I find C++ much more productive that Perl - I guess it's just a question of what you know <g>.

Well, I know (or perhaps, knew once) C++ also, and I find Perl infinitely more productive. But then again, I hated C++ from my first encounter. Time and experience only made things worse -- but I know I am in a minority in that view:)

BTW, if I:

my $spamtest = SpamAssassin::Mail::SpamAssassin->new(...) : shared;
[download]

will $spamtest be available in the clone if I perl_clone after this Perl code is executed?

I've never seen anyone use that syntax before, and a quick test seems to indicate that you cannot use :share in that way.

use threads; 
use threads::shared; 
use Benchmark::Timer;

$T = Benchmark::Timer->new() : shared;

Unquoted string "shared" may clash with future reserved word at (eval 
+3) line 1, <> line 2.
syntax error at (eval 3) line 1, near ") :"
[download]

Any attempt to share a blessed reference usually results in an error.

use threads; 
use threads::shared; 
use Benchmark::Timer;
{ 
    my $T : shared; 
    $T = Benchmark::Timer->new();
}
Invalid value for shared scalar at (eval 5) line 1, <> line 5.
[download]

So, I think the short answer is no.

I assume you were hoping to share a single instance of spamassasin between the multiple interpreters. This will not work.

Creating a unique instance in each interpreter would(may) probably work, but I have no idea how much memory that would consume.

That would require a piece of suck-and-see engineering I am afraid. Unless anyone else knows better.

Sorry, I didn't mean to insult you (or anyone) with my C++ comment. I don't know Perl at all (as illustrated in my code example) so C++ is guaranteed to be faster for me. Plus I have good C++ tools (VS.NET) and no real Perl tools (again, editing scripts using VS.NET).

Fortunately, despite my dismal Perl code example, you understood my question. I can deal with the answer - thanks once again.

Ideally what I would like to do is prevent running the SA startup/initialisation code more than once (or so). This stuff takes quite a while to crank up and will kill performance. If I can't share a single instance, can I somehow "clone" a pre-initialised instance? (Last question, I promise, at least until I get to do some experimentation tonight).

If I can't clone the object I'll definitely have to have a pool of interpreters lying around. I'm not overly concerned by the memory consumption as ActivePerl already consumes a heap of memory anyway, I can't imagine a few more instances of SpamAssassin will make that much difference.

Phil

I certainly wasn't insulted. Many people like C++, I prefer C or smalltalk or even Java, but that's really just me:)

Never having used spamassasin, any further comment on that would just be speculation.

I can't think of any easy way to clone a pre-initialised instance, but you might find that the initialisation costs are mostly a first-time setup cost at the spamd end and that subsequent connections are relatively low? You'll have to try it I think.

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks.

"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail
Hooray!