Re: [boost] Active Objects Library

From: Dean Michael Berris (mikhailberis_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-10-19 04:52:15

Hi Chris!

On 10/19/06, Christopher Kohlhoff <chris_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> Dean Michael Berris wrote:
> > The question would be whether there will be (or whether there
> > already is) a "generic" active object implementation? We've
> > found that Boost.Asio's io_service is a good scheduler/queue
> > and using a futures wrapper for the result types.
>
> An alternative to having an io_service per active object is to
> have multiple active objects share a single io_service (would
> these be called "semi-active objects"?).
>

This sounds alright, though the problem I see with this is that when
we profiled a single io_service solution as compared to one io_service
per active object, we saw significant improvements (on multi-core
systems) on the one io_service per active object. Of course, this is a
case-to-case basis analysis, and it shouldn't be hard to make this
work semlessly. For example, a set of active objects can use a single
io_service while another set of objects can use another one.

> If you also use a strand per active object, then the active
> objects can even share an io_service with a thread pool calling
> io_service::run(). The strand will ensure that the operations
> for a single active object don't execute concurrently.
>

This sounds like a good approach indeed. I haven't tried strands yet,
but this does seem to make a lot of sense. Although we use thread
locking primitives even on the active objects (which I thought were
necessary without using strands).

-- 
Dean Michael C. Berris
C++ Software Architect
Orange and Bronze Software Labs, Ltd. Co.
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