[Haskell-cafe] Killer pickler combinators (was Time leak)

[Joel Reymont]

I don't want any kind of locking, true. I need all bots to respond in  
time otherwise the poker server will sit them out. Eliminating the  
timeout on pickling does not eliminate the timeout overall, it just  
passes it to a different place.

One thread will go through serialization quickly but it will be too  
late by the time it sends a response to the server since it waited a  
few seconds for the chance to have a go at serialization. I'm trying  
to build 6.5 right now (having trouble, you might have guessed ;))  
and will positively study the scheduler. I do not believe thread  
priorities are supported in GHC, though.

I had a thought about using continuations but then I would also have  
to do selects on a few thousand file descriptors myself. Then I would  
have to decide which continuation to run based on priorities. I might  
as well patch the GHC scheduler to do what I need. Alternatively, I  
can just throw in the towel and rewrite the app in Erlang.

I haven't made a firm decision yet, I think I will make my records  
storable first as you can't get "any closer to the metal". If that  
does not work then I will just give up. I do have other apps to write  
in Haskell but it will be a pity if this one does not work out.

	Thanks, Joel

On Dec 21, 2005, at 9:12 PM, Cale Gibbard wrote:

> Unfortunately, the way we have it here still affords no guarantees, it
> just serves as a mechanism to help keep things from getting too bad.
> It's unclear to me that you really don't want any kind of locking. I
> think that you might do quite well to decide which threads get to run
> yourself at least to some extent. After all, you know more about their
> priorities and how long they have to complete their tasks than the GHC
> scheduler does.

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