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Date:      Fri, 24 Aug 2001 12:09:45 -0700
From:      Joe Kelsey <joe@zircon.seattle.wa.us>
To:        freebsd-java@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Contributing...
Message-ID:  <15238.42617.926667.683393@zircon.zircon.seattle.wa.us>
In-Reply-To: <20010825025921.A49770@misty.eyesbeyond.com>
References:  <3B8688AA.6956F1BD@ideasandassociates.com> <20010825025921.A49770@misty.eyesbeyond.com>

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Greg Lewis writes:
 > On Fri, Aug 24, 2001 at 01:02:34PM -0400, Tim Liddelow wrote:
 > > For native threads, has there been any consideration on the linuxthreads
 > > port?  
 > 
 > Yes.  The problem is that this adds another dependency to the JDK and
 > presents us with some distribution problems due to its LGPL nature.
 > The gain is that you can utilise multiple CPUs, but this is still at
 > the expense of threads which appear to be quite a bit more "heavyweight"
 > than the native FreeBSD pthreads.

Aside from the supposed GPL contamination, linuxthreads are severely
broken and are likely to always be severely broken until someone there
implements real threads.  I have direct experience trying to use both
linuxthreads and FreeBSD pthreads and the linux version fails misreably
under heavy thread load (say more than 100 threads), whereas FreeBSD
threads just keeps on ticking...

The basic problem is that the so-called "threads" in linux are just
process forks in which forks share memory areas.  This is a miserable
way to implement threads, but it is also a trivial hack for someone who
doesn't want to really do it right.  It also works for very simple
cases, but again, I have direct experience showing how miserably it
fails under load.

/Joe

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