Re: [Caml-list] Asynchronous IO programming in OCaml

["Jérémie Dimino" <jeremie@dimino.org>]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 11:33:51AM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> You aren't doing any multithreading. You are creating a thread and
> waiting for the thread to finish its read before strating a second.
> There are never ever 2 reads running in parallel. So all you do is add
> thread creation and destruction for every read to your first example.

Yes, i know that. The idea was just to show the overhead of context
switches.

> You should start multiple threads and let them read from different
> offsets (use pread) and only once they are all started join them all
> again.

Sure, but doing this directly in Lwt raises other problems:

- This means prefetching a large part of the file into the program
  memory.

- The kernel already prefetches files from the disk, so most of the time
  this is just a memory copy in parallel...

- How many threads do we launch in parallel ? This depends on the
  overhead of context switching between threads, which can not be
  determined at runtime.

I think that the solution with mincore + mmap is better because it uses
threads only when really needed.

Jérémie