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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!arclight.uoregon.edu!nntp.primenet.com!nntp.uio.no!nntp.zit.th-darmstadt.de!fu-berlin.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.infosystems.www.misc Subject: Re: Unix too slow for a Web server? Date: 3 Nov 1996 18:28:45 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 32 Message-ID: <55io8t$jca@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <323ED0BD.222CA97F@pobox.com> <552p74$23e@polo.demon.co.uk> <554fun$r8v@clarknet.clark.net> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.misc:139809 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:30619 comp.infosystems.www.misc:45370 wmcbrine@clark.net (William McBrine) wrote: > The reason Win NT -- and, IMHO a better choice, OS/2 -- systems might be > faster web servers than Unix systems, in some circumstances, is their use > of lightweight threads. I think the discussion about the usefulness of threads is as long as the idea of threads. :-) Threads are a great thing in some circumstances, in particular if you gonna share much data between the threads (where, in a multiprocess environment, you would need some IPC setup, e.g. using shared memory the one or other way). I think things like graphical applications (one thread running the main job, one running the menu handling etc.) benefit most from it. I'm not sure whether a Web server will benefit that much however. If you gonna use threads only as a poor-man's workaround for a system that cannot fork fast enough (since either the system or the hardware has problems) however, you need not be surprised to find other systems (on other hardware) performing as well or better with a non-threaded but plain multiprocessing approach. The fork/exec times of modern Unices are often very fast these days. (No surprise, fork() is of fundamental importance for a Unix system, hence everybody tried to optimize it as good as possible.) -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)