Also, I found today the Elizabeth Mattijsen's forks.pm module, and read that it uses TCP communication (why not UNIX, or -again- mmap?).
Patches are welcome. ;-)
Also: I''ve recently become to appreciate memcached, and was wondering whether that would be a good alternative for setting and fetching shared values.
Unfortunately I don't have the tuits until at least the beginning of March.
I read a little of the code but couldn't understand anything :).
Is there anything in particular that you don't understand more than the rest?
I'm very worried about performance issues, and some hints would be useful before deciding what to use for the project.
Using TCP/IP will add latency and some CPU overhead to your inter-thread communication. How this offsets with using a lot less memory, is really dependent on your situation. Basically I would say, don't expect forks.pm to be faster than threads once threads have started. On the other hand, for any serious program (with any serious number of modules loaded), there's a good chance that forks.pm will be faster in starting a thread.
Having spent many hours trying to figure out what to do, there is very little stopping me from trying a complete C solution, but that would be painful! Please, give me some hints so I can still be a lazy perl lover :)
If speed is what you ultimately want, then C would be the way.
If you don't need any inter-thread locking (which may happen in some applications), then maybe a fork / memcached combo would be a solution if you have a large amount of shared data. See Cache::Memcached on CPAN.
Hope this helps.
Liz
