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From: Andreas Pflug <[email protected]>
To: Andrew Dunstan <[email protected]>
Cc: Postgresql Hackers <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [pgsql-www] NuSphere and PostgreSQL for windows
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2003 19:08:54 +0200
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
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	<[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>

Andrew Dunstan wrote:

> Tom Lane wrote:
>
>> BTW, I've been wondering lately if we'd not be better off to look at
>> using threading in the Windows port, if it'd help us get around the
>> fork/exec data transfer problem.  I'm not sure that it would, mind you,
>> but if it would give an answer it might be a lot less painful than
>> solving the data transfer problem directly.
>>
>
> I am sure you are correct. The whole Windows API is more multi-thread 
> friendly than multi-process friendly, and operates far more 
> efficiently that way, as I understand it. There is also some potential 
> benefit on some *nix systems, where thread creation is far less costly 
> than forking, or at least this used to be the case last time I looked 
> at it.
>
>>
>> Our main objections to threading in the past have always been lack of
>> portability and loss of robustness.  Portability isn't an issue for a
>> Windows-only solution, and I'm not too concerned about the other either,
>> since I'll never think that Windows would be a place to run a production
>> server anyway.
>>
>>  
>>
> Not that I like Windows all that much, but using it for a server is 
> becoming more defensible as an option. As for portability, what *nix 
> is there these days that doesn't have some sort of lightweight thread 
> support?
>
> Maybe the relevant parts of the system need to be abstracted out and 
> threading generally made a build time option (on by default for 
> Windows, off by default otherwise, maybe?) 

This seems to be the best option.
Whether a specific *ix application really benefits from threads or 
suffers from this, should be evaluated on each platform. Having this 
option is certainly advantageous.

BTW, this would lower the problems with memory over-commit: no forking, 
no spare mem allocation needed, right?

Regards,
Andreas

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