[erlang-questions] Synchronous communication with prim_file port

Salikhov Dinislam Dinislam.Salikhov@REDACTED
Mon Oct 23 14:35:40 CEST 2017


Hello.

I have an erlang process that receives logs from other processes and 
writes them into the file.
The logs are written to the file via file:write() which in turn boils 
down to erlang:port_command/2 call followed by getting response from 
driver via "receive {Port, {data, Data}} -> ... end" (see 
./erts/preloaded/src/prim_file.erl, write/2 and follow the calls).
And here comes a trouble: if log rate is too high then while driver does 
its job, a lot of messages are waiting in the process's message queue 
and the receive has to walk through all of them to find the driver's answer.

Is there any rationale for write operation being done this way?
I'd like to propose an optimization here: if we know in advance that 
standard drv_get_response/1 will be used to get driver's response, then 
we can use synchronous erlang:port_control/3 instead to avoid the whole 
message queue traverse.

Salikhov Dinislam



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