Interrput a thread

[Fuzzyman]

On Jan 4, 3:31 pm, Roy Smith <r... at panix.com> wrote:
> In article
> <2ebc11a5-1b45-4faa-97b9-c84f0db01... at k22g2000yqh.googlegroups.com>,
>
>  Fuzzyman <fuzzy... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It is unsafe to terminate an os level thread at an arbitrary point
> > because it may be executing code in a critical section.
> > [...]
> > The standard advice is to use a flag and do manual checking to abort
> > threads. This only works for fine grained operations and *doesn't*
> > work for very coarse grained operations or where there aren't
> > convenient places to check the flag.
>
> Another possibility is to not use threads!  If you
>
> 1) Need asynchronous operation
>
> 2) Need iterruptability
>
> 3) Can't poll for an "please stop" signal
>
> You should look at running your "thread" as a separate process, which
> you can send a kill signal to when you want it to go away.  You can then
> communicate with it via pipes, sockets, shared memory segments, whatever.
>
> Threads are a wonderful invention, but they are not a panacea for all
> possible parallelism tasks.  Sometimes they're just the wrong tool.

However some tasks / algorithms are done much better with threads than
processes.

Asynchronous operations are good for IO bound concurrency but not for
CPU bound concurrency.

Michael Foord
--
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/