All of this OF COURSE assumes that you have kernel threads. Your basic
userland mit-pthreads-or-whatever package is no help at all here.
> > and whenever it writes a block to the log files.
>
> That can be a problem, and I think that for a lot of other reasons logs
> should not be written directly in the main select loop but should
> use separate process to do it, connected through pipe (context switches
> between loop and that process don't look like a significant danger for
> performance).
>
In fact, log files should be written to an entirely different machine...
> > Both on Linux are extremely cheap, but a clone() based thread is a fair
> > bit faster than a process switch if you are using CLONE_VM as it doesnt
> > cause a TLB flush on a task switch. You also want one thread per cpu or
> > more of course 8)
>
> What are advantages of having >=1 thread per cpu to having >=1 process
> per cpu, if any?
He just explained that, didn't he? Context switching among (kernel) threads
under Linux is faster than switching between processes.
> heavy-processing chunks of code, select() on everything that is waiting
> shouldn't cause delays compared to threads that basically will do the same
> thing implicitly in this model, but will introduce additional "light"
> context switches between themselves.
>
select() is not that cheap (the kernel has to copy and scan three lists of
however-many file descriptors), plus you'll have to do a process switch
afterwards. A thread switch is cheap: A thread hangs in accept() => as soon
as it returns, make another thread runnable by raising a semaphore (which
then will do another accept() on the socket), service the request
synchronously, then wait to be called again (by waiting on the semaphore).
In the trivial case, this will even work with just one thread per port
you're listening to.
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