threads - use them as much as you can

[Thomas Lindgren]

> In R7B (the current release) there is a new feature which introduces a pool
> of native threads for i/o operations but this is disabled by default. This
> will get around the hanging problem /.../ 

Some web server research indicates that (on some OS:es) the entire OS
process hangs on, say, disk I/O. The solution they proposed is to run
disk I/O in a separate process. I'm not sure what Erlang/OTP does.

(The web server is Flash, developed at Rice by Vivek Pai, Peter
Druschel et al.)

A great thing about Erlang is that _if_ this is an issue, then the
runtime system can be implemented to do the right thing on every OS.
Every Erlang application will then take advantage of the 'best
practice', without rewriting a single line of code. Contrast this with
'rolling your own' in C.

			    Thomas
--
Thomas Lindgren					thomas+junk@REDACTED
Alteon WebSystems

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