On Apr 5, 2009, at 14:59 , Andrew Farmer wrote:

On 05 Apr 09, at 08:17, Michael Ash wrote:
On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 9:33 AM, Kirk Kerekes <kkere...@cox.net> wrote:
[Use a separate process instead of a separate thread]

I recommend avoiding this if possible. Processes are a somewhat scarce
resource on OS X (only 266 per user by default, looks like) and you
don't want to be using up more than you have to. It's unfortunate
because it can make things easier as you say.

It's also not particularly effective if your lengthy task involves any significant processing of data that's been created within your application. [..examples..]

Yes, you do need to take a little bit of care that your communication is balanced with your processing. However even simple pipe-based IPC is blindingly fast on OS X and most if not all Unix systems these days: on my MBP it clocks in at > 1GB/s.

And while you probably don't want to spawn tens or hundreds of processes, one or two should certainly be OK and give you the benefits of process isolation for your long-runing task. Heck, Google does it with Chrome, so it must be good, right? ;-)

Marcel



_______________________________________________

Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com)

Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list.
Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com

Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com

This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com

Reply via email to