[Haskell-cafe] STM, IO and event loops

[Simon Marlow]

On 28 November 2005 11:47, Joel Reymont wrote:

> On Nov 28, 2005, at 11:32 AM, Simon Marlow wrote:
> 
>> On Unix with -threaded, all blocking I/O using Handles or sockets
>> goes via the I/O manager thread, which multiplexes all the blocked
>> I/O requests into a single select() call.  If you have 20k blocked
>> socket reads, there will be 20k lightweight Haskell threads, and
>> probably 2 or 3 real OS threads.  Without -threaded the outcome is
>> pretty much the same, except the runtime does the select().
> 
> I'm not well-versed on the differences between select in the I/O
> manager and the runtime. What is the difference? Should I just plug -
> threaded into my cabal file and not worry about it? How big of an
> impact is select() in the runtime?

When the runtime is doing select(), you'll get more calls to select()
because the runtime calls it for every thread switch, whereas with
-threaded select() is only called when something changes - we need to
wait on a new descriptor, or I/O is available on one or more
descriptors.  So you should get better performance with -threaded for
large numbers of descriptors.  Also you might get a small amount of
parallelism on a multi-processor because the select() will run on a
different CPU.

I'm aware that there are various better alternatives to select(), but we
don't use any of them yet.

Cheers,
	Simon