I didn't think it was possible for the render agent to be interrupted like that. Isn't the point of the MVCC system that the render agent will see a consistent view of the world as it was when the render started? And that the ants can continue modifying the world during the render's processing but the render agent will not see any of it until it has completed it's transaction? It only reads the refs so it shouldn't ever retry.
Sorry to jump in despite being inexperienced at this, but it makes me think I don't understand something correctly. Dan On Jun 29, 6:51 pm, B Smith-Mannschott <bsmith.o...@gmail.com> wrote: > After watching most of Rich's Clojure presentations over the weekend, > I found myself playing with ants.clj again on my netbook. The ant > simulation runs brilliantly on my quad-core machine at work. Not so > much on my netbook. The problem seems to be that with only a single > (hyperthreaded) core the render agent is almost constantly interrupted > by some pesky ant while attempting to snapshot the world, forcing the > render agent to automatically retry. And so, the ants run merrily > around the world, only I can't see it. > > This raises a question. Clojure's refs and dosync sure are neat, but > this experience would seem to indicate that there are potential > scalability problems when combining long-running and short-running > transactions. Under load (or on a slow machine) a long-running > transaction may never get a chance to complete and may be stuck > forever retrying, burning CPU but producing no useful output. This > makes me uneasy. > > I was able to get ants.clj to work reliably on my netbook by playing > around with the sleep times in such a way as to increase the > probability of the renderer actually completing a snapshot, but this > process felt hacky and ad-hoc. What works on my netbook might well be > sub-optimal on another system. > > How could one change the design of ants.clj to work reliably (i.e. > update the screen periodically) even on slower systems? > > // Ben --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
