Polling is bad...

[Paul Santa Maria <paulsm1021 yahoo com>]

Hi -

Just FYI, "running another function in the background... to be called every
some  milliseconds..." can be *extremely* detrimental to performance.  It could
easily make your program a *very* unpleasant thing to be running in a
production environment.

Often times, there's no way to avoid it.  But please consider other
alternatives first, and invoke your function *only* as a last resort, if there
is *no* other way you can think of to use asynchronous notification instead of
polling.

Here's a discussion of a GTK+ application that successfully manages the down
side of polling:

http://www.usenix.org/event/usenix02/tech/freenix/full_papers/goel/goel_html/



> Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 08:47:58 -0400
> From: zhanglei <zhanglei sict ac cn>
> Subject: Re: what is the function name that you can send a function to
>       be running every n milliseconds
> To: y g <odysseus lost gmail com>
> Cc: gtk-app-devel-list gnome org
> Message-ID: <42D7B07E 8010805 sict ac cn>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
>
> y g wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > I remember using some kind of function that allowed me to "send
> > another function to the background" and be called every some
> > milliseconds passed as parameter, but I can't remember its name or
> > where the documentation lies.... If someone has a quick answer to that
> > please help...
> >
> > Cheers
> > _______________________________________________
> > gtk-app-devel-list mailing list
> > gtk-app-devel-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-app-devel-list
> >
> >  
> In file gtk-General.html of GTK+ Reference Manual(mainloop and events)
> g_timeout_add( guint timeinterval, int (*func)(gpointer data), gpointer 
> data );
>
> Maybe this is what you are finding .