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Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 11:21:05 -0500
From: Barney Wolff <barney@databus.com>
To: Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>
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Subject: Re: Byte counters reset at ~4GB
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On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 12:36:21AM -0800, Julian Elischer wrote:
> 
> I believe that the expense is that acting on the counters can not be 
> both cheap and atomic at the same time..
> I think we need a whole pile of atomic primatives in addition to what we
> already have. including an atomic reference conting method and
> atomic statistics methods.

At the risk of seeming foolish, let me ask if atomicity is really necessary
for these counters.  Yes, if there can ever be multiple writers, of course.
But if the problem is only that a reader might get an answer wrong by
4e9, most readers (eg, netstat) probably shouldn't care, and those that
do could sanity-check the result and repeat the read if necessary.  What
am I missing here?

-- 
Barney Wolff         http://www.databus.com/bwresume.pdf
I'm available by contract or FT, in the NYC metro area or via the 'Net.