Threaded runtime (was Re: [Haskell-cafe] Project postmortem)

[Simon Marlow]

On 02 December 2005 13:32, Joel Reymont wrote:

> I was going on this quote by Simon PJ:
> 
> --
> It should be find to have lots of threads, esp if most of them are
> asleep.  The only thing to watch out for is that GHC's runtime system
> will consume one *OS* thread for each *blocked* foreign call.  So if
> you have 10k threads each making a separate call to the OS to read
> from 10k sockets, and they all block, you'll use 10k OS threads, and
> that will probably fail.
> --
> 
> Is this correct and if so how does it mesh with what you said above?

It's correct, but not the whole story.  When you do a blocking I/O
operation, it is not implemented in terms of a blocking foreign call, so
it doesn't create an OS thread(*).  In -threaded mode, blocking I/O is
implemented by sending a reguest to the I/O manager thread, which
returns a response when I/O is available.  In non-threaded mode,
blocking I/O is implemented by returning to the runtime, which
occasionally checks for available I/O and wakes up the appropraite
threads.

Either way, as I said, the programmer doesn't see any difference.

(*) except on Windows, where everything is done differently and blocking
I/O currently gets a real OS thread.

Cheers,
	Simon