Lots of systems/embedded programmers roll their eyes at this kind of talk. Threads aren't really that hard.
Event queues do have benefits in certain situations. They pair nicely with state machines. You can easily end up in callback hell though, and it is often difficult to integrate some long-running, atomic tasks into your event loop. You end up doing things like having a thread pool, at which point you have to wonder why you stopped using threads in the first place. Oftentimes a threaded approach is a cleaner approach. Just get the locking granularity right - it's not that difficult.
Systems/embedded programmers roll their eyes at this kind of talk because they usually control (or at least have visibility into) all of the code that goes into their stack. Threads aren't that hard under these conditions.
The main problem with threads is that they're non-composable: the set of locks that a thread holds is basically an implicit dynamically-scoped global variable that can affect the correctness of the program. If you call into an opaque third-party library, you have no idea what locks it may take. If it then invokes a callback into your own code, and you then call back into the library, there is a good chance that your callback will block on some lock that a framework thread holds, that framework thread will block on a lock you hold, and then the code that releases that lock will never execute. Deadlock.
If you control all of the code in your project, this does not affect you: define an order in which locks must be acquired and released and stick to it. If all of your dependencies have no shared data and never acquire locks themselves, this does not affect you (and indeed, this is recommended best practice for reusable libraries). If you never call back into third-party libraries from callbacks, this does not affect you, but it severely limits the set of programs you can write. If all of your dependencies thoroughly document the locks they take and in which order, this affects you but you can at least work around the problem areas and avoid surprise deadlocks.
Most application developers do not work under conditions where any of these are true, let alone all of them. Application development today largely consists of cobbling together third-party libraries and frameworks, many of which are undocumented, many of which are thread-unsafe, and many of which spawn their own threads and invoke callbacks on an arbitrary thread.
Python and early Linux kernels use a single global mutex for access to all shared mutable state. In my experience, this is an entirely reasonable design decision for a huge majority of applications.
Well, you don't let lock semantics fall outside of a library frontiers. That means you do two things; first you do a global organization of the threads (no OOP-like patterns), second you export threads to the outside world in a hierarchy that exactly reflects the code hierarchy (easiest if you export a single thread).
There are some patterns that are safe as long as you implement them correctly. The patters that are good for IO are among the simplest, so that's where the GP was coming from. But it's not viable because he has full control of the code, it's viable because his problem domain has good options.
I agree with both of you. I don't think threads are THAT hard to work with. It definitely takes some experience to do it well and quite a bit more documentation to maintain the expected invariants. When libraries can get into a tangle, it's usually code that's in house and better ripped out. Easier said than done I know.
Open libraries tend to either just be single threaded abd should be used as such or explicitly thread-safe.
Disclaimer: Used threads in Java not much in C. Love me some Jsr-133 volatiles. Still confused with the Java 9 memory model updates.
Quite. I'm so fed up of the "threads are bad" argument (in my mind it's been commonplace since about 2008, so it's interesting to see this piece from 1995).
I've made use of threads at some point in almost every single job of any duration. They're one of many problem solving tools and if you understand them, which isn't particularly difficult, at some point you're bound to run into a problem that's a natural fit for a multi-threaded solution.
Nowadays, especially with no shared state, they're super-easy to use on many platforms. Take, for example, the parallel support in the .NET framework, along with functionality that supports debugging multi-threaded apps in Visual Studio like the ability to freeze threads.
If you do need to share state, which is when locking becomes essential, most languages and platforms have easy to use constructs to help you do this without much in the way of drama.
I'm not suggesting for a minute that there are no dangers, but there are plenty of dangers with other programming techniques, as well as lurking in any system of sufficient complexity, so I don't really understand why threads garner so much hate.
> which is when locking becomes essential, most languages and platforms have easy to use constructs to help you do this without much in the way of drama.
This is actually a problem. It is very easy to just slap locks around which, depending on your workload, can cause the threads to be blocked waiting for work.
I have seen many designs that used threads "for performance", but had so many locks in place that a single threads would actually perform similarly, with much less code complexity.
Once you get past a couple of locks in your code, it starts to smell.
Just because you can do Thread.New in your favorite language, doesn't mean you are using them correctly or efficiently.
It reminds me of a critique of threads in The Art of Unix Programming (available at http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch07s03.html#id2...). And now that I look it up, it actually cites the Ousterhout paper! This suspicion of threading was one of the few parts of that book I found unconvincing, personally, but it's another witness that they have worried some people for a long time.
A lot of work in programming languages over the past decade has been devoted to providing a safety net and guard rails for avoiding the pitfalls of thread-based concurrency. See in particular Rust and Go. It's still quite possible to corrupt data and get deadlocks, but our languages have come a long way to making it harder.
But the point of this article is to say if we ditch the notion of threads entirely and go with this other thing, we won't need safety nets anymore because it will be impossible to deadlock and corrupt data (as opposed to less likely).
I love go and goroutines, but besides the ability to select() over channels I wouldn't say go has done much to help get concurrency _right_. Mostly just easier. Even Java has a few more tools for healthy concurrency.
I don't blame go because I'm not convinced threads are all that bad, but having more concurrent data structures would be great.
Yes, small careful software teams can make threads work. However, if you start to work with physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, and so on who are incredibly smart in their own areas, but who don't have or even value a skill in software, you'll discover they make a real mess out of threaded programs in a way that doesn't happen with separate single-threaded processes.
If that's your audience, then you should give them a library/framework/language that hides all the complexity. I'm currently spending a lot of time working on Python Tornado stuff on an embedded device, and I can say that the lack of threads does not substantially reduce the number of ways you can screw things up.
They aren't my audience... they're my coworkers. Sometimes I get to pick how we do a project and sometimes I'm there to help them with their project. If they chose to use threads, I generally try to escape quickly.
No experience or comment on Python/Tornado. We don't really do a lot of web stuff.
But sure, people can screw things up in lots of ways. However, once a threaded program is screwed up, you really only fix it by starting a new version - it's near impossible to incrementally fix race conditions and dead locks - you can't reliably repeat the bug to debug it. Bugs in non-threaded code can at least be tracked down one by one.
There's even a course from GA Tech (Intro to Operating Systems, publicly available on Udacity) that covers how to use threads safely and sanely. I went in knowing nothing but terror from a failed experiment in naive multithreading and came out wanting to apply threads to everything. Maybe not quite the right approach, but I at least feel vastly more confident with keeping them manageable. Like you say, managing how and when to lock is the key.
It takes a lot less expertise to make events as fast as threads as it takes to make threads as safe as events. I don't know about the rest of you, but I personally do not have a brain that can become an expert on every topic.
If your state machine event handlers are non-blocking, then the thread pool is the same size as the number of available hyperthreads. That's not hard either. And, as observed elsewhere, it becomes impossible to screw up. That's a powerful property, and makes it possible for non-embedded 'normal' folks to write correct code in this space.
Oh, to return to what life was like 23 years ago, when GUI applications were so simple that you could get away with fitting all their work onto a single thread.
Nowadays, a great many GUI apps have a lot of data crunching to do in the background. You've really got two options for how to handle that:
1. Be intermittently unresponsive, like iTunes.
2. Do work on a background thread, like decent software.
(Intentionally omitting the option of breaking your work into a bunch of tiny bits that can be handled on a single thread's event queue like some sort of deranged node.js app from hell, on the grounds that please no I can't even.)
Even 20 years ago single threading was well known to be inadequate – anyone doing file or network I/O got daily reminders of how bad that was as the UI wedged, not to mention MacOS where holding a menu open froze an app.
Windows NT, OS/2, and BeOS were better, if only the hardware cost cane down and we could ditch this legacy DOS/Win16 code…
I guess the author knew what was about to be foisted upon the world.
Kudos for trying to warn us.
(I remember reading Novell and OS/2 documentation in the late 80s / early 90s about threads and recoiling in horror. Of course, all real men must use threads, cuz they’re faster, even if stupefyingly dangerous)
The author is John Osterhout, a CS professor. He was working at Sunlabs at the time. It's not like some unknown lone voice from the bowels of Sun was 'trying to warn us'. Warn us about what, anyway?
BeOS was pretty good, and now that i'm wiser in the tooth, they were basically implementing the Actor model, except since it was in C++, it was really hard to guarantee that the programmers wouldn't do stupid things with shared state.
A serious practical problem with threads mirrors the same problem with C++, which is that many programmers reach for it first when they should be reaching for it last. Both of these technologies are like swallowing glass, and the wise programmer will avoid them if at all possible.
I don't claim these are "go-to" solutions, but only that there are multiple solutions to pick from.
One solution is processes (mentioned in the post). Fork a process which does your computationally expensive thing and then get the result when you are done. For the security minded, we've seen this make a bit of a come back because separate processes can be run with more restrictions and can crash without corrupting the caller. We see this in things like Chrome where the browser, renderers, and plugins are split up into separate processes. And many of Apple's frameworks have been refactored under the hood to use separate processes to try to further fortify the OS against exploits.
Another solution is break up the work and processing in increments. For example, rather than trying to load a data file in one shot, read a fraction of the bytes, then on the next event loop, read some more. Repeat until done. This can work with both async (like in Javascript) or you can do a poll model. Additionally, if you have coroutines (like in Lua), they are great for this because each coroutine has its own encapsulated state so you don't have to manually track how far along you are in your execution state.
More expensive to start than threads, and far more expensive and complex and restrictive to move data around. Sounds like with the exception of some specific corner cases, threads are a better solution.
> Another solution is break up the work and processing in increments
Either the tasks aee broken into ridiculously fine-grained bits that are hard to make sense or keep track,or you still get a blocking UI. Furthermore, the solution is computationally more expensive.
Fork/exec time for extra processes is usually unimportant. If data transfer is truly a bottleneck, shared memory is as fast as threading.
These costs, though, are generally trivial compared to the lifecycle costs of dealing with multithreaded code. Isolation in processes greatly enhances debuggability, and it's almost impossible to produce a truly bug-free threaded program. Even a heavily tested threaded program will often break mysteriously when compiled with a different compiler/libraries, or even when seemingly irrelevant code changes are made. It's a tar pit.
Maybe, but, on Linux, processes and threads are almost the same thing.
Additionally, even where a process is a bit more expensive to create, it is not enough to block the UI thread from being responsive. I have first hand experience with this on different operating systems, including Windows, and it is more than fast enough to keep the UI completely responsive.
> and far more expensive and complex and restrictive to move data around.
Not necessarily. For threading, synchronization patterns are not necessarily simple. (This is why computer science instruction spend time on these principles.)
Furthermore, some languages and frameworks provide really nice IPC mechanisms. Apple's new XPC frameworks are pretty nice and make it pretty easy to do.
> Either the tasks aee broken into ridiculously fine-grained bits that are hard to make sense or keep track,or you still get a blocking UI.
As I mentioned, coroutines make this dirt easy. It principle, this doesn't have to be hard.
> Furthermore, the solution is computationally more expensive.
That doesn't really follow. The underlying task is the where the computation is. You are just moving it, either to a process, a thread, or dividing it up, or something else (e.g. send it to a server to process). At the end of the day, it is the same work, just moved.
Yes, you might need some state flags for breaking up the work, but threading also requires resources such as creating and running the thread, the locks and protecting your shared data, and so forth. There is no free lunch any way you do this.
Processes might be more expensive but they do have advantages.
If you do use a lot of CPU time, spawning a process instead of a thread might not have any noticeable impact at all.
Additionally, IPC isolates the process, meaning it can be more resistant to hostile takeover (if you drop privs correctly) and additionally you avoid any and all shared state that could possible result in unforeseen bugs.
You will want two have two (conceptual) independent entities, doesn't matter if they are processes or threads. Depending on the architecture they may not even live in the same machine. One entity will deal with user input, which will cause some work to be requested. The other entity will perform the work and report results. You pass messages between them.
The exact architecture will vary according to your needs. There was one project I was involved with, which contrary to what Joel Spolsky would say, we recommended that it be entirely rewritten. The biggest problem? Spaghetti code and threads. Or rather, they way threads were misused. You see, there was no logical module separation, they had global variables all over the place, with many threads accessing them. There were even multiple threads writing to the same file (and of course, file corruption was one of the issues). To try to contain the madness, there was a ridiculous amount of locking going on. They really only needed one thread, files and cronjobs...
For the rewrite, since we were a temporary team and could not trust whoever picked maintenance of the code to do the right thing, we split it into not only different modules, but entirely different services. Since the only supported platform was linux (and Ubuntu at that), we used d-bus for messaging.
This had the not entirely unexpected side effect of allowing completely independent development and "deployment", way before microservices became a buzzword. You could also restart services independently and the UI would update accordingly when they were down.
Even then, at least one of these services used threads (as tasks). Threads are great when they are tasks, as they have well-defined inputs, outputs and lifecycle.
At another project, I had to call a library which did not have a "thread-safe" version. A group at another branch was using Java, and they were arguing that it would be "impossible" to use that library without threads. The main problem was, as expected, that the library used some shared state. We would just fork() and call the library and let the OS handle.
Threads are a nice tool, but that is only one of the available tools in your toolbox. Carpenters don't reach for a circular saw unless there is no other way, because it is a dangerous, messy and unwieldy tool.
I just rewrite an expensive task so that it explicitly processes a chunk that takes a limited amount of time...which also helps with running out of resources in many cases.
I have seen that argument in the past but somehow still can't see how event-based approach saves us from the headaches of concurrency.
If you need to deal with parallel processing (which is relatively often in the real world) you WILL have to face the problems of consistency, visibility and program order.
Many languages don't even require programmers to have much exposure to threading mechanics. It's an OS responsibility, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Not just "more often" but essential. We've been at four hardware threads for a decade now, and we're just entering a new era where increasing the number of CPU cores is becoming a marketing tactic.
Shared mutable state is where the problem lies, but in a lot of cases shared memory can be used to pass it without copying from a "scheduler" thread to worker threads for parallel processing in non-overlapping chunks, and then back for compiling into a whole.
They manage without threads pretty well, I think. Shared state is deliberate, outside of individual processes, rather than accidental in-process. As it should be unless you are doing some serious systems level programming.
Gotta love the downvotes. So, it’s offensive to suggest that there are alternatives to threading on a post about WHY threading IS a bad idea???
Actor model with messages (events) sent between potentially isolated processes, perhaps?
If you truly need to run a compute intensive task in the background, the effort to [de]serialize a “command object” to and from another process should not be much overhead, vs sharing almost all memory by default.
Once you reach the point where you are starting a thread pool at start up, rather than spawning threads on demand, why not just have a process pool?
Shared memory blocks can also be used to explicitly share data too large to effectively serialize as a message / event.
If you truly have something that pumps huge amounts of data between compute intensive tasks, then threads make sense. Proceed with extreme caution, and try to encapsulate the trick bits.
Under Linux, you don't need threads. Threads and processes are basically the same thing. You just provide different flags which tell the kernel how it should view that process, which will impact things like memory isolation, copy on write, etc.
Under Windows, it is a different story. Threads and processes are wildly different constructs, and threads are more lightweight. Sometimes, still not lightweight enough, so they came up with fibers.
Threads are not hard.
In fact, threads are extremely easy to implement.
However, real Threading code is just incredibly difficult to reason, just by looking at it. This makes it easy for you to introduce race conditions without even knowing that there is one!
There is also the fact that locks don't lock anything!
They are just a flag, that a any code may choose to ignore.
They are a not an enforcing tool, just a cooperative one.
I've built things with pthreads a few times, and also used threading in Java, Rust, Python, and Ruby. (Edit: C# and Perl too IIRC. :-) The best book I've read about using threading safely was the O'Reilly Java Threads book. It's been about 16 years, but I remember it being a great "teaching the concepts" book, taking you through lots of pitfalls and showing how many ways you can mess up. It taught me way more than just Java. Like oldgeezr I kind of roll my eyes at the "you must be this tall to use threading" stuff, but I think I largely owe to that book both my confidence and my wariness. I bet it is still worth reading today.
Also, I have bad news for you if you are a web developer: unless all you're serving up is HTML (either static or generated on the server[1]) you are developing a multi-threaded app - it just happens to be the case that the threads are running on different machines. Race conditions between client and server code are a thing, so you'd do well to understand the concepts of multi-threading.
[1] And even in this case you're probably still multi-threaded, although in most cases it won't feel like it because your server side threads won't share state.
Threads were overprescribed in the 90s. I’m pretty sure the original example code for drawing an image in Java involved typing “new Thread” so that the image could be loaded over the network in the background. Truly the way to write apps in the Internet age!
At the same time, Java’s threads are so easy to use — without of the portability or debuggability issues of native threads — that threads don’t seem that bad to Java programmers. Yeah, shared state can be a foot gun, but so can global variables. You just keep things as pure and easy to reason about as possible. And Java has had concurrency primitives that keep you from having to deal directly with threads and locks for over a decade.
I don’t think “events” and threads solve the same problem. If your program would work just as well doing all its work in a single thread then yeah, you don’t really need threads. If we’re comparing “events and callbacks” async style to async/await style where you write your code as if it were running in a thread (even if it isn’t), I think the latter wins.
As mentioned in other comments, Ousterhout is the inventor of Tcl/Tk (among other things). At around the time this was published, Tcl was my favorite "play with" language, and it naturally lacked sort of built-in threads abstraction. Also at the same time, Tcl/Tk had just become a project at Sunlabs. One of their early projects was to take the event-loop that was the underpinning of Tk and add it to Tcl.
I started a new project back around then to build a system for deep caching of web sites to give time consistent access offline. I implemented as a web proxy with an online/offline button. As you browsed web sites, it would crawl recursively following a set of rules. The intent was to precache content near what you already explicitly accessed, to make it available offline later on (we called this the "detachable web").
While not the primary purpose of our project, I put together a demo to optimize the Alta Vista search results page, which at the bottom only had a "Next" button (unlike the "1 2 3 4 5..." you see at places like Google today). When you clicked "Next", it took Alta Vista a few seconds (4-5) to return the next page of search results. My system would prefetch the 10 pages of results by POSTing the "Next" for you, basically while you were still reading the first page resuls. The result was "Next" became instantaneous. Again, this is not why we built this system; this was just one novel approach I used it for.
I mentioned all this because the entire project was implemented in Tcl. Being influenced by the lack of thread support in Tcl and by the paper mentioned in the OP, my project utilized a event-driven model for everything, since every inbound user require could fire off dozens of background fetches, all of which needed to be done in parallel. Events (and continuations) worked well for this. I have a paper up from the 5th Tcl/Tk workshop:
I had used for the project Tcl because it let me support all three prevalent platforms of the time: UNIX, Windows 95, and MacOS 9. Day-to-day work was done on FreeBSD.
I think have some commentary in the paper on the effects of the event-driven approach. What's funny is that I was taken off the project for v2, which the team then decided would be written in Java using threads, because, well, Tcl wasn't mainstream enough. In 1997, Java was the rage. The downside is that they could never get v2 working reliably enough because of the explosion in memory and processing power it required to accomplish the same work. In Tcl, having 60 traversals active when it was just 60 continuations (events) just worked. In contrast, the Java implementation needed 2-3 threads per traversal, and it just couldn't scale up to that.
Like in almost any functionality of a computer or programming language, it helps to understand them, being aware of the risks and knowing alternative approaches.
Threads can be a bad idea but if you keep in mind what variables you use and guard shared memory, it's fine. Sometimes you might prefer a process instead for security/resistance.
Just FMI: the "events" approach that's recommended in the article over threads, that's how Python libraries like tornado and twisted work, right? And to what extent does the new asyncio Python library assume that functionality?
Events don't share mutable state (at least implicitly), they carry a copy of data. This eliminates a huge class of thread-related errors.
The canonical thing that works this way is Erlang (and its modern cousin, Elixir). See also "actor model" (e.g. Akka). It is approximately how Windows and Mac GUI used to work (back in the day; did not look at these APIs for ~20 years).
Python async is coroutines, a different kind of concurrency. In it, the event loop is hidden, and coroutines just yield control, implicitly or explicitly, to allow other coroutines proceed. In Python, a CPU-bound task can only run on a single thread, due to the Global Interpreter Lock preventing concurrent modification of data. Coroutines are still useful both for IO and as a general way to describe intertwined, mutually dependent computations. (The earliest, limited Python coroutines were generators.)
> Events don't share mutable state (at least implicitly), they carry a copy of data. This eliminates a huge class of thread-related errors.
I'm not sure that's true, at least not in my problem space. Copying data leaves you the possibility of operating on stale data, which will result in the computation returning the wrong answer. To avoid that, you have to let the event handler know somehow when the data has changed. How are you going to do that?
I was not coding in 95, and therefore don’t understand the perspective of the author back then, but it seems clear from the presentation that the culprit was “shared mutable state”, not “threads”. Wasn’t functional programming a thing back then?
Yes, but threads (the popular APIs - eg. POSIX threads, Win32 Threads) imply the availability of of shared mutable state, concurrency, and custom written locks. And when something is available, it will be used. Heck, you could even pass a pointer to an address in some other thread's stack with ease.
The amount of experience you needed to program that, while dealing with structuring the rest of your program could be large, especially if you were adding threads to an existing program.
Functional programming is cumbersome to pull off in the systems programming languages available at the time (C).
Threads are good, shared state is good if hidden behind a proper protocol, just locks are evil. Windows and POSIX are to blame.
Nowadays nobody should use locks anyway, as there are much better, faster and safer variants for concurrency with native threads, based on actor capabilities and ownership, and avoid blocking IO like hell. No, not Rust. Rust did it wrong.
Those who do it right are so far Pony, Midori/Singularity, and parrot with native kernel threads. With simple green threads there are some more, but they are only usable for fast IO, not fast CPU tasks.
As I remember things, for the most part, no. Which is to say that of course there were people doing FP (Lisp is old as the hills & Haskell was launched in 1990) but my perception was that it wasn’t remotely mainstream in the way it is now.
No, not really. I started studying computer science in 1995, and functional programming was presented as a very nice concept that never worked out because the performance was terrible. I heard about academic types loving their functional languages, but I had never seen it used in any practical projects, although there probably were some out there.
LISP was the best-known functional language, although I learned a bit of ML in one of my programming language classes to give us a look at what a functional language looked like. The professor was terrible at explaining functional programming, so I didn't understand it until many years later when I slowly started doing functional-style Javascript and then learning Elixir.
Functional languages really shine under parallel-processing conditions, but that wasn't a big thing at the time. Processors could handle multiple threads, but there was only one core, so only one thing could run at a time. Systems with multiple cores or multiple processors were rare and expensive.
C++ was the dominant language then and all multi-threaded programming (at least all the multi-threaded code I ever saw) used threads with locks to access mutable state shared between threads. No doubt there were some people who had better knowledge, but virtually all software developers at the time were either doing single-threaded code or writing C++ code using threads.
Many languages we use now didn't exist then, and we just knew what was widely used at the time. Haskell existed, but I had never heard of it. Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Go, and Rust weren't around. Javascript was just introduced that year. A lot of stuff was written using languages like C, C++, Ada, and (ugh!) Visual Basic.
It wasn't until many years later (after 2010) did I slowly learn about immutable state and functional programming. Languages had evolved a lot in that time and functional programming overhead no longer mattered now that processors had become so much faster and had started sprouting multiple cores. We also have fastly more memory at our disposal, so we don't have to write code anymore that is super memory-efficient at the expense of everything else. Functional languages aren't performant enough to write an operating system in (and they usually don't allow manual memory management), but they're just fine for most applications.
Functional languages and the concept of immutable state have really flourished since 1995, now that the environment is much more favorable for them. Faster processors and more cores made functional programming and immutable state much more practical to use. I'm so happy that this is the case, because writing multi-threaded code with a shared mutable state was really tough.
Is this still true today? Even back when I was a young coder threads really weren't that difficult for me to understand and develop. With many of the modern languages, threading is even easier than before.
Oh look, an ad for Visual Basic from 1995! Event driven code sucks and is not better. I learned this writing VB code. Others learned the hazards of event driven code in the Therac 25.
Being event driven was not the problem with the Therac 25. No QA, no real testing, and the elimination of hardware locks which would’ve entirely prevented the problem in the first place were the problem with that system.
OK threads aren't "BAD" or "GOOD", threads are a tool to be used correctly.
Threads are like a data super-highway and all the incorrect uses of them arise from using them for way to little data. Akin to building a 5 lane highway for 5 cars to pass.
A thread has some amazing things of being able to switch an execution very fast (built into things on the CPU level) and memory caching/storing advantages. Aka a thread is meant for a compute heavy task like rendering something, or running a decode in the background, mainly doing heavy math. Threads provide great things but at a cost. just like a highway they cost a lot ( a lot of memory in your ram) and require some maintenance and management (locking mechanisms)
The problems with threads arise when people think its ok to use them everywhere for all tasks parallel or async.
Example Apache used to start a thread for each connection to server which at that time took 40 MB + .5 sec and this allowed a myriad of attacks on, one of them being slow loris.
In java-script if you start a new web worker thread, that's actually a new V8 instance and costs you again a lot in memory and startup time.
This "start a thread for everything" was definitely the prevelant thinking in the first decade of 2000, and people were not really thinking about hidden costs.
Come along Ryan Dahl with node.js in 2009 and "OMG everyone forgot there are such things as event loops"
An event loop is basically a much cheaper single threaded async way of processing events in an event queue, the big idea here was that in most other languages threads waited for any time consuming I/O to network or hard disk and let other threads run in the meantime.
Ryan combined the async nature of event loops with async I/O... rightfully a very clever move. (also I/O locks is what often causes thread locks in multi-threaded environments)
This allowed the single threaded event loop to never really lock up with any time consuming, but not CPU related task, freeing the CPU to constantly process the event queue, in a way emulating multi-threading on a single thread.
Going back to the highway metaphor, this would be more like an elevated city bike path, it cant take heavy trucks (heavy CPU loads) but it can take a huge amount of light processing request and never lock up, freeing up your city streets from bikers and leaving them more free to run the heavy trucks.
something you would never be able to achieve if u started a thread for each one.
basically this is akin to building 1 dense bike path for 600k bikers or building 600k 5 lane highways down each only 1 biker would go.
Where node.js falls short is if u give it heavy math tasks, the event loop will lock up.
So in my analytics processing server i had a node.js main loop with a bunch of V8 web-worker thread pools, to do the heavy math and statistics, while the main thread just routed requests and served cached data.
Another consideration however is memory leaks, threaded environments tend to clean up well after themselves, because if there is a leak in a thread it gets wiped when the thread dies. But node.js is very susceptible to memory leaks.
All these things are just tools, you have to learn when to use the right tool for the right job.
But i think there are much more pitfalls in building threaded environments then there are using event loops. I got node js concepts within a week or two, however i still struggle with some thread lock concepts even after taking clases, and shit is way harder to debug properly too. Its that high abstract level of thinking that i have a hard time visualizing in my head, and i am never sure that i though EVERY scenario through.
>Ryan combined the async nature of event loops with async I/O... rightfully a very clever move.
How is it clever? You cannot have async IO without an event loop. Async IO was a pretty mature technology long before nodejs came out. Netty did this back in 2004. The only special thing about nodejs is that it's culture is to be async by default.
What does multiprocessed model have to do with the "async cult"? And who exactly is in the async cult? Because "async" to me means "async io" like epoll, kqueue etc, which are pretty much necessary to go from ~100 concurrent connections to ~10000 in a performant manner. That will never go away while we're on x86-based architecture.
Async cult (mostly node people) proseltyzing that promises/callbacks are the one true way while glossing over many many scenarios where that execution pattern is less than desirable.
Wasn't projecting async all the way down to IO primitives.
Commented because most of the debate seems to be threads vs callbacks--with processes being unwisely overlooked.
Interesting. Fundamentally, in order to achieve async io, a continuation is necessary. Syntax may hide this (e.g. async/await), or make it apparent as in callbacks/promises. I can't blame JavaScript for not having syntax that makes async pretty.
That being said, if we're talking not about IO, but about cpu/memory bound problems... Well I'd be lying if I said it was uncommon in my career to come across people who assumed, to the detriment of simplicity, quality, and performance, that a calculation (e.g. process a list mapping op with AsParallel/parallelStream) would be aided by parallelism. That is just ignorance by Dunning-Kreuger devs who don't apply a critical eye to their own experiences.
You're focusing on performance. Performance is not the world. Parallelism is not the only reason to use cooperating processes. There are other considerations--like task fairness, and isolation.
Lots of systems/embedded programmers roll their eyes at this kind of talk. Threads aren't really that hard.
Event queues do have benefits in certain situations. They pair nicely with state machines. You can easily end up in callback hell though, and it is often difficult to integrate some long-running, atomic tasks into your event loop. You end up doing things like having a thread pool, at which point you have to wonder why you stopped using threads in the first place. Oftentimes a threaded approach is a cleaner approach. Just get the locking granularity right - it's not that difficult.