It's slow, uses a ton of memory

The following code spawns 100 threads in under 2 seconds and uses < 40MB? 

>perl -Mthreads -le"print time;@t=map{threads->new(sub{sleep 300})}1..
+100;print time;<>"
1107144770
1107144772

[download]

I agree they aren't doing much, and that is probably considerably slower than you can spawn 100 processes--but if you need the parent to communicate with the children and vice versa, then you'd need to a lot more work using fork.

It is true that there are some inconvenient restrictions (some of which could be alleviated), and you do have to learn a few simple techniques for getting the best from them--like not loading anything you don't want shared before you spawn your threads--but they are stable and very usable.

On Win32, they are infinitely preferable to fork, but I realise that that is a restriction of the platform. I can well see why anyone on unix wouldn't bother with them unless they really needed bi-directional communications.

I agree that the implementation is imperfect, but having spent a little time looking into the work that they are doign, I think teh guys that got them to where they are are did an brillaint job given the task they faced.

Examine what is said, not who speaks.
Silence betokens consent.
Love the truth but pardon error.

In reply to Re^5: Isolating dynamically loaded modules with Thread::Isolate. by BrowserUk
in thread Isolating dynamically loaded modules with Thread::Isolate. by gmpassos

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