On Wed, 13 Oct 2010, Andrew Brunner wrote:
On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 3:24 PM, Michael Van Canneyt
<mich...@freepascal.org> wrote:
Is it possible I have the pthread library in some sort of debug mode
that is slowing down the process of thread creation?
I seriously doubt it.
What you could do to test, is write your program using direct Pthread calls.
This way we can ascertain whether it is the FPC or Pthread code which is the
bottleneck.
Right. I'm going to do more reading on the POSIX threading system. I
did get to trace into the threading unit under linux and the first
thing I noticed was that a mutex was used to suspend and create the
thread instead of using the ThreadManager.Suspend and Resume features.
My local copy has removed the semaphore and I instantly noticed a
speed increase in thread creation due to the lack of the extra
semaphore per thread.
Based on what I see as far as performance goes, the current version of
threading under Unix takes 2 semaphores per thread. One by use in the
threads.inc file and at least one by the pthreads.so !
If need be, I can dig up my texts for the Kylix book, it describes how to do
this in Object Pascal. I suspect the code would still be pretty much the
same.
I would say let's try to obtain source to pthreads or something. I'd
bet we can just do a straight shoot into something from there. If
it's open source i'd bet we can bother them perhaps for a newer
version more high-scale friendly.
Yes, write an object pascal version of it, which accesses the kernel
directly and bypasses the C library.
That's exactly what I'm thinking. There are only like 36 methods to
implement. Depending on how hard will be to hook into the kernel...
The kernel thing is easy, just a vfork() call, if I'm correct.
It's all the rest that is difficult: synchronization, mutex,
semaphores :)
The only thing is we're going not going to have diversity as found in
the pthreads.so. I'd bet they have tons of code for Darwin, Debian,
Redhat, etc. I guess it's unknown at this point but well worth the
time to explore.
I don't think the various Linux distros work different in this respect.
They all use pthreads now, and they all use the same kernel interface.
It has been on many people's wish list for ages.
I presently can create 1,500 threads in 2 min 27seconds. That's 2 1/2
threads per second... 25min! Pathetic...
Remains the question why anyone would want to create 1500 threads ?
Any number of threads above the number of CPUs is no longer efficient
anyway (give or take some corner cases with lots of I/O).
Michael.
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