Greg Ewing wrote:
Steve Dower wrote:
From my point of view, IOCP fits in very well provided the callbacks (which will run in the IOCP thread pool) are only used to unblock tasks.
Is it really necessary to have a separate thread just to handle unblocking tasks? That thread will have very little to do, so it could just as well run the tasks too, couldn't it?
In the C10k problem (which seems to keep coming up as our "goal") that thread will have a lot to do. I would expect that most actual users of this API could keep running on that thread without issue, but since it is OS managed and belongs to a pool, the chances of deadlocking are much higher than on a 'real' CPU thread. Limiting its work to unblocking at least prevents the end developer from having to worry about this. Cheers, Steve