What did you expect to happen?

What were you hoping to prove?

Your sleeps are not doing what you think.

Perl's built-in sleep takes an integer number of seconds as it's argument. So sleep .1; becomes  sleep 0;.

That means that each of your threads:

1. Starts
2. Detaches itself so that it will die immediately it finishes rather than hanging around for some other thread to join it and retrieve it's return value.
3. Print's it's message.
4. Sleeps for no time
5. Then finishes. Which as it is detached mean that it's resources are freed immediately.

Hopefully, that explains why there are only ever 3 or 4 threads in the process list at any given time.

As for why the program terminates. I could speculate that your running out of resources somewhere and segfaulting, but that doesn't explain the absence of any error message. Which OS are you running?

Update: If your considering doing anything serious with threads, you should upgrade to 5.8.3 at least and preferably 5.8.4. Ithreads were not very stable before this.

What did you expect to happen?

Complete until an exhaustion of resources and then give error

What were you hoping to prove?
Find why my program exited without error

Your sleeps are not doing what you think.
Thanks.... learned something new...

I modified the code... now I can see the thread count
increment in process monitor but yet the perl app still
exits at random times without error.

I should have stated Windows 2000 Build 2195 SP4

I'll see if activestate has an update

Thanks for all the info

Here is the code that still fails



use strict;
use warnings;
use threads;

my $thread_count = 0;

for (1..5000) {
  threads->new(\&handle_thread,++$thread_count);
}
sleep 10;
print "--Parent Quits --";

######################

sub handle_thread {
    my $thread_count = shift;
    threads->self->detach;                # so long parent
    print "You are thread number $thread_count \n";
    sleep 3;
}
[download]

--jammin

Thanks to all!!

BrowserUk you nailed it...

I just ran the sample code against
5.8.3 and works fantastic.... 5.8.1 is not thread stable

Thanks again


--jammin

Here is a modified version of your program, which runs flawlessly (at 100% CPU) , and produces 5000 threads.

I'm on a Windows XP machine @ 1 GHZ, 1 G memory.
perl, v5.8.0 built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread.

use strict;
use warnings;
use threads;

my $thread_count = 0;

for (1..5000) {
  threads->new(\&handle_thread,++$thread_count);
  sleep .1;
}
sleep 10;
print "--Parent Quits --";
######################
sub handle_thread {
    my $thread_count = shift;
    threads->self->detach;                # so long parent
    print "You are thread number $thread_count \n";
    sleep .2;
}
[download]