Re: Multi-threaded

[Brent Baccala <cosine freesoft org>]

On Wed, 2 Jun 2010, Toralf Lund wrote:

> First question: Is this list actually alive???

Yes, barely.  I'm a late comer, but it looks to me like the free
software community experimented with CORBA for a few years and then
(for some good reasons) largely abandoned it in favor of other
approaches.

> Second question: Can anyone explain how to set up an ORBit2 server
> so that it can process several requests in parallel via
> multi-threading?

The single most important thing is to request threading when you
initialize the orb:

    orb = CORBA_ORB_init(NULL, NULL, "orbit-io-thread", &ev);

I've not had any (client) threading problems since I switched from
"orbit-local-orb" to "orbit-io-thread".  This causes a new thread to
be cloned to handle of the network I/O.

> But this doesn't really help me much... I mean, if I set up one
> thread with a glib mainloop, what do I do in the others? Surely the
> requests won't just magically end up in other threads without me
> telling ORBit2 that they exits?  Should I perhaps run mainloops in
> all the threads?

I don't use ORBit2 for a server, so I can't really answer that.  All I
can tell you is that requesting "orbit-io-thread" ensures that all the
networking I/O is done through a single thread, avoiding problems like
one thread receiving a reply that was intended for another thread.  Of
course, in a client environment, you can always match up replies to
the thread that requested them.

Maybe somebody else can comment on how the server code works.


					-bwb

					Brent Baccala
					cosine freesoft org