On Tue, 3 Feb 2004, Peter Edwards wrote: > I have certainly taken that at face value at least once when deciding on > how to use (or not use) pipes. Is this portability issue so > ridiculously out of date that the comment in the pipe(2) manpage should > be removed, or at least toned down? It seems silly to incur the costs of > implementation you've mentioned and then recommend that the feature not > be used. Well, I don't know so much about the portability issues, but I can say that it seems silly to incur the costs if few applications take advantage of the feature. Especially if the cost can be defered until the feature is exercised. I have some local patches that defer all pipe buffer allocation until a particular direction is first used, but this has some potential downsides, including increasing the chances that a lack of resources is discovered on first-use, rather than on allocation of the pipe (which makes it a lot harder to write robust applications). Another issue to look at is keeping a pool of buffers to amortize the cost of allocation from the pipe_map, which is something I've also started looking at. I haven't tried benchmarking the differences as yet. Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects robert_at_fledge.watson.org Senior Research Scientist, McAfee ResearchReceived on Tue Feb 03 2004 - 07:56:59 UTC
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Wed May 19 2021 - 11:37:41 UTC