[fpc-pascal] getting started with threads

[Dariusz Mazur]

David Emerson pisze:
> I am getting started with threads (linux/cthreads) and I'm very happy so 
> far, but unsure of the best way to tackle my situation.
>
> I have a program that needs to perform about 10,000 independent tasks, 
> which usually involve waiting for I/O; thus it makes sense to use 
> several threads so that some waiting can be done in parallel. I thought 
> I'd try it with 10 threads.
>
> When a thread completes its task, I'd like it to simply request a new 
> task from the queue. The best way I could think to do this was to have 
> a task assignment function (which accesses a global variable and 
> returns a task id, marking it as pending.)
>
> But how can I prevent race conditions? If threads X and Y happen to call 
> the task assignment function at the same time, it seems to me that they 
> could both be assigned to the same task. I know that this is a problem 
> which has been addressed at great length in the computer science 
> world ... so what's the easiest way for me to address it here and now?
>
>
> While writing this message it dawned on me that I probably need an event 
> loop (I'm writing a console app) which will, e.g., sleep for 1 second 
> and then check on the status of each thread's work. Then the main loop 
> can assign a new task by starting a new thread, whenever it finds one 
> that is finished. That puts the assignment task back in the main loop 
> where there is no race condition.
>   

You need FIFO queue for multiple consumer. Each task can be assigned to 
them.
You can use ordinal tThreadList but it rather slow.

I use own lockfree FIFO http://www.emadar.com/fpc/lockfree.htm to 
distribute task between threads
its much faster and well scaling on multicore.




-- 
  Darek