Re: [Boost-Users] threads and signals question

From: Luis De la Parra (lparrab_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-08-29 11:37:41

> IMHO I wouldn't use select.  Each time a new connections is initiated, you
> can simply start a new thread to receive data from that socket.  I don't
> know what performance impact this would have, but the code will certainly
> be simpler and easier to maintain.

as I said, I'm new to threads.. and I know they are much more "leightweighted" 
than a normal process, but imagine a server, like an application server, 
which can have *a lot* of clients connected at the same time, but in which 
the clients are not really all requesting thigs all the time, they are "just 
connected"

I think having a thread waiting on each open connection is not the right 
approach here, so I thought of going a kind of "production line" approach in 
which a few threads (5-10) are reading the data from a bunch of open 
connections (50-100), the only thing they do is read the data, parse it and 
form a "Request" which they put in a queue for further processing and then go 
on to service the other connections.
Then another group of threads is taking this requests and doing something, and 
putting Response objects in yet another queue, which another group of threads 
"Sender" is taking and sending thorugh the socket.

I think you get the idea: a frew threads just doing one thing and then passing 
the processing to another gorup of threads.

I know having a thread dedicated to each connection would be much easier, but 
since this project is mostly for fun (and to learn!) I'd like to take a 
"better" approach  (note that I am not saying the approach I just described 
is the best one, but right now it sounds more efficient and scalable to me 
than the one-trhead-per-connection approach)

regards,
luis.l