Request: export fork

[Derick Eddington]

I'd like to use it so I can make a server socket, fork a number of workers, and have them accept on it (easy multi-processor utilization and copy-on-write ikarus address spaces! :-). I've already been doing this with my patched ikarus. I think I'll post an example on ikarus-users once I've made it and fork is exported.

[Abdulaziz Ghuloum (aghuloum)]

Exported in 1500. I did preliminary timing of how fast fork is and it turns out to be about 20ms real time (you can do only 50 a second) on my macbook.

[Abdulaziz Ghuloum (aghuloum)]

> (define (f n) (unless (zero? n) (fork waitpid exit) (f (- n 1))))
> (time (f 100))
running stats for (f 100):
    no collections
    24 ms elapsed cpu time, including 0 ms collecting
    1992 ms elapsed real time, including 0 ms collecting
    0 bytes allocated

[Derick Eddington (derick-eddington)]

Yeah, I wouldn't use it repeatedly when super speed matters. I like it because you can fork as many workers as you have CPUs, and they can all accept from the same server socket which was created before the forking, and then use Ikarus's multiplexing non-blocking I/O system to have each worker handle multiple clients simultaneously. I'm still investigating if I've found a unicode transcoding bug and haven't gotten to timing it yet but it's looking fast :)

[Derick Eddington (derick-eddington)]

Linux seems to be a lot faster, and I know my laptop is slower than yours. (I think the 1600 bytes mine allocated is from the new waitpid.)

> (define (f n) (unless (zero? n) (fork waitpid exit) (f (- n 1))))
> (time (f 100))
running stats for (f 100):
    no collections
    20 ms elapsed cpu time, including 0 ms collecting
    524 ms elapsed real time, including 0 ms collecting
    1600 bytes allocated

[leppie (leppie)]

fork is painfully slow on Windows, just see how ./configure takes to run on Cygwin :(

[Abdulaziz Ghuloum (aghuloum)]

On Jun 13, 2008, at 9:40 AM, leppie wrote:

> fork is painfully slow on Windows, just see how ./configure takes
> to run
> on Cygwin :(

Since you already have a launchpad account, you might as well order
your free Ubuntu CD now*, ... :-)

* https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

[leppie (leppie)]

Thanks, but I got that :)

I used to have an install, till my WD Raptor hard disk failed :(

Anyways, who else will check the Cygwin builds? :)