Carl J. Van Arsdall wrote: > Alright, based a on discussion on this mailing list, I've started to > wonder, why use threads vs processes. So, If I have a system that has a > large area of shared memory, which would be better? I've been leaning > towards threads, I'm going to say why. > > Processes seem fairly expensive from my research so far. Each fork > copies the entire contents of memory into the new process. There's also > a more expensive context switch between processes. So if I have a > system that would fork 50+ child processes my memory usage would be huge > and I burn more cycles that I don't have to. I understand that there > are ways of IPC, but aren't these also more expensive? > > So threads seems faster and more efficient for this scenario. That > alone makes me want to stay with threads, but I get the feeling from > people on this list that processes are better and that threads are over > used. I don't understand why, so can anyone shed any light on this? > > > Thanks, > > -carl > > -- > > Carl J. Van Arsdall > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Build and Release > MontaVista Software
Carl, OS writers provide much more tools for debugging, tracing, changing the priority of, sand-boxing processes than threads (in general) It *should* be easier to get a process based solution up and running andhave it be more robust, when compared to a threaded solution. - Paddy (who shies away from threads in C and C++ too ;-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
