The Unscalable, Deadlock-Prone, Thread Pool

Re:The Unscalable, Deadlock-Prone, Thread Pool by mcqueenjordan on Tuesday February 26, 2019 @10:19PM (#19260565)

Title is misleading. The author seems to mask what they're saying in a way that makes it really easy to conclude that their point is "Thread pools are bad, so I'll show you a better way." In fact, the proposed better way is ThreadPools(tm).

In fact, "The Unscalable, Deadlock-Prone, Thread Pool" is only referring to a badly used ThreadPool. Like, really badly: the strawman that forms the crux of the argument is that you are only using the same ThreadPool for all of your disparate forms of work.

> My favourite approach assigns one global thread pool (queue) to each function or processing step.

Yes, creating different thread pools for different kinds of work is a much better way to use them...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Unscalable, Deadlock-Prone, Thread Pool by fiter on Tuesday February 26, 2019 @11:10PM (#19260800)

The .NET libraries make it easy to use the default thread pool (a single pool). If other libraries are similar, then I wouldn't consider this a complete straw man.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Unscalable, Deadlock-Prone, Thread Pool by eurg on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @05:55AM (#19262410)

Yes, but the .NET thread pool is auto-tuning, although very badly, with at least a second latency to increased workload. For bursty requests that could be done within a few hundred milliseconds it is a bad fit. But you can't DOS your batch processing server so easily.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Unscalable, Deadlock-Prone, Thread Pool by tybit on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @05:19AM (#19262265)

Nonetheless the single thread pool in .net core seems to scale really well.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Unscalable, Deadlock-Prone, Thread Pool by commandlinefan on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @12:13PM (#19264794)

> Like, really badly: the strawman

Maybe so, but I've seen this pattern a LOT.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Unscalable, Deadlock-Prone, Thread Pool by mcqueenjordan on Wednesday February 27, 2019 @05:23PM (#19267493)

Fair point. I haven't seen it much, but I don't doubt that it happens.

I just wanted to emphasize the point, which wasn't clear, that ThreadPools aren't bad, but rather that bad uses of them are bad.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Unscalable, Deadlock-Prone, Thread Pool by lemmsjid on Tuesday February 26, 2019 @10:43PM (#19260676)

Agreed. I feel that he should engage with the actor model in this article or a subsequent one because it seems to me like the type of abstraction he’s searching for. E.g. where each actor generally performs one type of work, each has a mailbox with a variety of parallelism strategies, message passing semantics discourage deadlock scenarios... Not a perfect solution but one to discuss when talking about the problems he’s trying to solve.

[ Parent | on HN ]