The Unix-world got by for years with out a serious threads implementation because the underlying hardware was a uni-processor, and 'threaded' was merely another synonym for 'time-sliced'. That world-view changed with the advent of the graphics-support processor, to offload the image rendering computations from the CPU. The world is changing again with the appearance of (relatively) cheap multi-processors. Once you have real hardware support for parallel execution streams, you _have_ to have some way of handling the synchronization/communications problem. If your problem is partitionable, with no inter-process interaction, you can throw multiple uni-processors at it. If it isn't partitionable, intra-process communications based on threads is manditory.

Consider your average large main-frame based organization, say My Bank, with over 5 Tbytes spinning and a 1% per month growth rate. Each second they have to support between five and fifteen thousand simultaneous transacations; each transaction can generate between 10 and 500 DB calls (mostly read disk accesses, but). Asynchrous I/O is the only way to go here, otherwise you get a end-to-end response time that is measured in fortnights.

Once upon a long time ago: ASP and JES3.... (Bring Back The Splat!)

----
I Go Back to Sleep, Now.

OGB

In reply to Re: Threading vs perl by Old_Gray_Bear
in thread Threading vs perl by Eyck

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.