On 8/22/05, Michael Sparks
[ Please excuse me if this isn't of interest. I saw this and suspected that people here might be interested (whether agreed with or not) though - if it isn't, my apologies! ]
Hi,
I was forwarded a link to this paper just recently (and skimming the past 5-6 months of archives here it doesn't look like it's been posted to this list). Since it looks interesting I thought I'd forward a copy to yourselves.
http://www.usenix.org/events/hotos03/tech/full_papers/vonbehren/vonbehren_ht...
you have to take this paper in CONTEXT of the previous paper tha one of these same authors wrote about a year earlier. The SEDA paper -> http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=5&url=http%3A//www.eecs.harvard.edu/%7Emdw/papers/seda-sosp01.pdf&ei=IQcKQ6ilLMPc4QGu0rGXDg Where they come to the exact OPPOSITE conclusion :-) It is all good reading! They are NOT promoting threads as much as they are promoting a better scheduler for threads. Which is what SEDA ( and Twisted ) provide with the event driven model. Their basic conclusion is that EXISTING threading implementations are too general/generic and a more specialized scheduler that is way more effiecent would make Threaded programs scale better AND have the more friendly Thread style interface. Until someone picks up thair Carpaccio project and make it produciton worthy, we will probably just have to keep dealing with the complexity of event driven async programming idioms like Twisted. -- If you don't know what you want, you probably need a nap.