threading : make stop the caller

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 1:39 AM, Laurent Claessens <moky.math at gmail.com> wrote:
> My problem is that when FileToCopyTask raises an error, the program does not
> stop.
> In fact when the error is Disk Full, I want to stop the whole program
> because I know that the next task will fail too.

If you're starting a thread for every file you're copying, you're
starting a huge number of threads that probably will just end up
fighting over the disk. To get a reasonably efficient early-abort, I'd
recommend having a fixed pool of worker threads (say, ten of them),
and have each thread (a) check if the early-abort flag is set, and
then (b) start copying the next file in queue. Once the queue's empty
or the early-abort flag is set, all ten threads will terminate when
they finish their current transfers.

(The ten threads figure is arbitrary. Optimum value for performance
will come by adjusting this.)

ChrisA