Question about threads [beaver challenge]

[Julian Elischer]

On Tue, 10 Feb 2004, Daniel Eischen wrote:

> On Tue, 10 Feb 2004, Julian Elischer wrote:
> 
> > 
> > 
> > On Tue, 10 Feb 2004, Craig Rodrigues wrote:
> > 
> > > On Tue, Feb 10, 2004 at 06:22:28PM -0500, Daniel Eischen wrote:
> > > > That's why I wanted to know what top -H showed.  We saw the
> > > > same problem with python -- it was using system scope threads
> > > > by default.  The port has since been changed to use process
> > > > scope threads.
> > > 
> > > Is this a Linux-ism that we will need to be aware of
> > > for other ports that use pthreads?
> 
> Probably, yes.
> 
> > 
> > process scope threads a re perfectly reasonable.. they however
> > use more resources and are more heavily limitted.
> > 
> > 
> > On the other hand process scope threads can lead to nasty surprises with
> > the limits as they can "suddenly" hit th ekernel limit after running
> > successfully for a time when they all (by some fluke) all decide to
> > enter the kernel at the same time.
> 
> Well, since the kernel limit for scope system threads is much smaller
> than that for "threads blocked in kernel", you'd hit the limit much
> sooner if the port/application used scope system threads instead
> of scope process threads.

but at least it wouldn't be a surprise :-)

> 
> > We probably should increase the  limits from 150 and 50 to 
> > 600 and 300 or something.
> 
> That's fine by me.  It's all a guessing game for me 'cause I
> don't really know what you'd expect to see with some of these
> applications.
> 
> -- 
> Dan Eischen
> 
>