Girish Venkatachalam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> > Like many things in computing it just depends on what one is most
> > comfortable with and using the right tool for the right job. One time
> > that is events, the other time that is threads...
> > 
> > Greets,
> >  Jeroen
> > 
> Disagreed. Your points are either not valid enough or not clear
> enough for me.

Try to see past your dogmatism.

> Can you please give me anecdotes to support your viewpoint?

I'm right now optimizing a real-life application - a search engine,
that uses threads because it has to properly run on multiple cpus and
use a couple of GB memory that needs to be shared among the threads.

Did I mention that all our servers run Linux out of practical reasons?
(even the firewalls, we don't want to waste time and brains to maintain
different operating systems, we have enough work to do without wasting
time on religion).

> Now, don't tell me it is bcoz OpenBSD does not have proper threading
> support. I won't buy that argument.

I could never run our search engine on OpenBSD because OpenBSD doesn't
have proper threads. The SMP support is not really a huge problem
because most of the time is spent in userland, but without proper
threads the search engine would be too slow or require too many
machines - too expensive. (The SMP support wouldn't allow us to run
our apache front ends, squids and databases but that's another story).

> Most of the beautiful UNIX programs that give remarkable performance
> are all either single process or multi process, not multithreaded.
>
> Apache 1.3.x? What about the pre forking model?

Pre-forked apache is slow crap. Threaded apache is faster crap. With
pre-forked apache, we couldn't fit our front end machines in the racks
we have. And we would have to spend much more money buying machines,
rack space, cooling, power, maintenance, etc. to do the same job if we
for some dogmatic reasons decided against threads.

> If you are interested in stability and maintainability of your code,
> dont touch threads with a ten foot bargepole....

If you don't know how to write code, don't touch tools that you don't
know how to use. If you know how to use the tools, you use the right
tool for the right job. If you don't believe that threads have their
uses, you haven't done enough interesting things in your life yet, I
wish you luck gaining experience in the future.

//art

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