Re: The cost of pthread-mutexes or corresponding...

[Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker]

From: Rich Salz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

rsalz> > It's probably OK to create, say,
rsalz> > 10000 of the former without ay problem, the latter would create
rsalz> > problems in those quantities:
rsalz> 
rsalz> 10,000 locks?  That concerns me.

I did exagerate a bit, but I see the possibility in big-scale SSL
proxies and stuff...

rsalz> Can you explain your proposed approach?  I don't recall.

Easy.  As it is right now, we have a small and finite number of locks,
one for each OpenSSL type (RSA, X509, ...) where we've found a need to
do some locking.  Those will of course be used in a threaded environment.

With type-level locking, any time some specific lock is activated for
some kind of operation, you lock out all operations that need a lock
on any instance of the same type, even if the instances have nothing
to do with each other and therefore should not lock each others out.

rsalz> Off the top of my head, if things are (properly) on the stack,
rsalz> then the only places that should need locks are global tables,
rsalz> no?

You forget about threads sharing some objects on the heap.  There was
a patch a few days ago about locking a little more around some RSA
operations...

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