Re: Committing Resources to Win32

Merlin Moncure wrote:

>Joshua D. Drake wrote:
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>>I believe that Apache 2.x is not completly threaded.. don't they use
>>some kind of hybrid model?
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>Apache by nature has a lot more performance issues wrt threading and
>process management.  Postgres is more generally I/O bound.  My
>professional opinion is that for win32 performance we should be looking
>at how the file system calls, especially synching, will run rather than
>ipc and threading.
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Yes, Web requests by the nature of the protocol are short-lived
connections - if you are setting up and breaking down connections at a
very fast clip then forking a server per connection is going to be very
expensive. That is not a common usage pattern with a database server and
a well written app, IMNSHO.

Apache's APR took them years to get right, too.

>>Hmmm... maybe this all becomes moot if we also do connection pooling?
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>This would serialize all database access...IMO not worth considering
>this angle.
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Why does it serialize access? I have a web server app with connection
pooling - it has a pool of 20 connections that it keeps around for when
they are needed - they can all be active at any given time. And a good
connection pool manager sets up the connections ahead of time so that
each request sees *no* startup time.

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>TLS variables are supported by the Win32 API, and all C compilers for
>windows support the Win32 API.  __declspec(thread) is just syntactic
>sugar which automate the API TLS commands.  Converting the variable
>access syntax is likely just one part of the overall move to the
>threaded approach.  A win32 centric move to threading will marginalize
>the port (again, IMO).
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*nod*

Joshua, can you tell us any more about the nature of your client's
app(s)? Speculating like this in the dark is a bit fruitless.

cheers

andrew