Re: debate on 700 threads vs asynchronous code

Ben Greear
2003-01-23T23:22:25Z

Lee Chin wrote:
> Hi
> I am discussing with a few people on different approaches to solving a scale problem I am having, and have gotten vastly different views
>
> In a nutshell, as far as this debate is concerned, I can say I am writing a web server.
>
> Now, to cater to 700 clients, I can
> a) launch 700 threads that each block on I/O to disk and to the client (in reading and writing on the socket)
>
> OR
>
> b) Write an asycnhrounous system with only 2 or three threads where I manage the connections and stack (via setcontext swapcontext etc), which is progromatically a little harder

You could also write something with async non-blocking IO and use NO threads
(ie, just a single process), which
may greatly simplify the debugging of your program (unless the developer(s) on your
project are very good at threaded programming already).

I suspect the async IO will perform better as well, but that is just an
un-founded opinion based on not wanting to think about scheduling 700 processes
that want to do IO :)

>
> Which way will yeild me better performance, considerng both approaches are implemented optimally?
>
> Thanks
> Lee

--
Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com> <Ben_Greear AT excite.com>
President of Candela Technologies Inc http://www.candelatech.com
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