Yes! Thanks! -bruce Andrew Akira Toulouse wrote:
Forgive the pedantry: do you mean "breathe", rather than "breath"?
On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 6:42 PM, Bruce Frederiksen <dangyogi@gmail.com <mailto:dangyogi@gmail.com>> wrote:
In this case, you're misunderstanding :-).
What I meant by a "long running" micro_thread starving other micro-threads, was a micro_thread that doesn't do anything that would cause it to be suspended (e.g., I/O, sleep).
For example, calculating the number PI to 2000 digits will starve other micro_threads.
Each time a micro_thread does something which causes it to be suspended (like a file.read that needs to access the disk, a socket.recv or a time.sleep), other micro_threads may run. So the first micro_thread doesn't cause the whole os-thread (generally the whole Python program) to be suspended, like it does now.
But if one micro_thread uses the CPU for a long time without doing any I/O, then other micro_threads are starved because micro_threads are non-preemptive (unlike os-threads).
I'm adding a "breath" function that allows responsible micro_threads to "come up for air" periodically, to give other micro_threads a chance to run. But nothing forces a micro_thread to cooperate like this...
I hopes this helps to clear things up!
-bruce