Re: Multithreaded application freezing

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 12:19 PM, Göran Hasse <gorhas raditex nu> wrote:

Sorry... I have NOT done mutch MS-Window programming. This since I
for about 20 odd years ago noticed that sockets (file descriptors)
is the ONLY safe way to do communications by. (select, poll or kernel-queue etc).

this is false.

 

And you should only have one place in your application for dispatching
events.

this is false, although in the limited sense that a particular event loop should only run in a single thread, it is correct.

 

ALL other communications mechanism tend to lock upp your application in one
way or the other.

this is false.

 

And since your communicate over a socket you can as well design
a good protocol to communicate by. And then it is easy to split the
application into serveral parts. You know like client/servers. And why
not many client-servers.

it might be easier for some purposes, but it is vastly more complex for others. and in your case, you recommended one process per window, which is absurd.

 

If you need a large memory segment you can use mmap() to have larger
memory area.

And you can study this in http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-spunix_sharedmemory/

i've been writing Unix applications for nearly 30 years. I don't need to read AIX documentation, thanks.

 

The process in Unix *is* the multitasking abstraction.

process-level parallelism is certainly more common in the unix world than on other platforms. but there is no reason to avoid threads when they are appropriate. and there is certainly no reason to use one process per window.

 

You must ask what event notification mechanisms you have
between threads!

Then read manual pages for kqueue() in BSD...
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=kqueue

Were can i find something like this for threads?

threads can use all the same mechanisms as processes, but don't have to use OS provided APIs to share address spaces. that's really the only difference.

 

And yes. My programs are a little bit more complicated - but they don't
hangs...

my program typically runs between 12 and 26 threads inside a single process. It has only a single thread that makes any GUI function calls (other than g_idle_add() or its equivalent). it doesn't hang.

but more generally, MOST applications don't need multiple threads or multiple processes, even when they have multiple windows. to suggest that you should plan on 1 process per window is crazy.