> Threading is good, use the kernel facilities, and don't over do it.
> People who think they need thousands of threads really don't, they
> just need to heavily rethink their design.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert systems programmer, and David is.
Still, though, there are legitimate applications wherein having multiple
thousands of threads necessary. The most active IRC server on the net,
from what I understand, is a FreeBSD Pentium which can accept ~1500 (this
is from memory) connections.
IRCD is a single-threaded application; threading it would be a very nice
option (allows use of SMP facilities, etc.) If it is going to destroy its
host machine by threading, however, then people aren't going to do it, or
they're only going to do it on platforms which allow them to do it.
A combo (clone<->lib) threading approach lets you do these sorts of things
easily. Telling the IRC designers "You shouldn't support more than 1000
connections per server" is kind of unrealistic, isn't it?
-- Todd Graham Lewis MindSpring Enterprises tlewis@mindspring.com