threadDelay problem

[John Meacham]

On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 12:38:11PM -0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
>  
> > The idea is to stop a Haskell prog with no runable threads or events
> > to process hogging CPU time. I was a bit dissapointed to find 
> > that despite
> > this on my (otherwise idle) machine the above code was still 
> > using 96% of cpu time.
> > 
> > But fiddling about a bit I found that by changing the thread 
> > delay in the
> > main loop to 20 mS the CPU usage dropped to 1% or so, which 
> > is much more
> > acceptable (well it did say 1/50 th second accuracy in the docs :-).
> 
> Yes, threadDelay will round the interval down to the nearest multiple of
> the resolution, so you were effectively using threadDelay 0.  This ought
> to be mentioned in the documentation.

this seems like the incorrect (and inconsistant with system interfaces)
approach. rounding up is the norm. alarm and sleep both say you will
sleep at least as long as the time specified. and threadDelay should
behave similarly. it is the more useful semantics anyway, since you are
usually waiting for an event to occur, and it is pretty much always okay
to wait to long, but can be bad (as in this case) to wait to short.
        John

-- 
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John Meacham - California Institute of Technology, Alum. - john at foo.net
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