On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 6:27 PM, Sven Van Caekenberghe <s...@stfx.eu> wrote:
> > > On 20 Feb 2017, at 10:30, Pavel Krivanek <pavel.kriva...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > > > > > > 2017-02-20 10:27 GMT+01:00 Guillermo Polito <guillermopol...@gmail.com>: > > As far as I remember, the main problem was not bandwidth but a blocking > and non-responsive UI. > > Imagine I'm in the university, or in a company with a proxy. And I > forget to set the proxy. Then, while spotter tries to fetch catalog > entries, it would block the image and throw a timeout error some minutes > after. > > > > So, maybe for the future and besides Ben's C option (which I like) I > have a > > > > D) Load catalog entries in background in a non-blocking way > > - and while catalog entries are not yet available, they should not be > shown > > > > AFIK the main problem was that there was not possilbe to do it > non-blocking way. > > Yes that is true. (It is actually DNS resolving that is blocked in some > freak case). > In sqUnixSocket.c I read... * Notes: * Sockets are completely asynchronous, but the resolver is still synchronous. So does this mean that if for any reason the resolver primitive takes a long time to respond, the whole VM is blocked? Thus forking the Catalog loading in another thread would have no benefit? Would having the resolver coded purely in-Image behave better? So a slow name resolution would not hold up the whole image if it happened in a forked thread. I found such an implementation in OpenCobalt and after some minor cleanup basic operations work fine. http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~BenComan/DNS/ cheers -ben > But the thing is, the problematic situation only occurs for a very small > percentage of people, like less than 1%, probably even much less. > (Remember, nobody can produce a repeatable case for it). > > So the question is, is that enough reason to act as if we are still in the > 90's when internet was a luxury and cut features that depend on it ? If you > have no network today, you're in big trouble anyway. (Again, if you turn > off your network, no blocking will happen at all, try it). > > So what is more important ? The general functionality of the 99.xxx % or > the unreproducible freak case ? > >
