Posix Threads and select()

[Richard Cranium]

Hello,

I have an interesting problem:

I've got one thread in my program meant to maintain a timing subsystem
and to do network I/O. It uses the select() system call to either wait
for I/O or "time out" and "handle" some arbitrary "event".

The timeout value for select() is calculated off of a list of "active
timers" which contains all the necessary information to correctly guess
when select() needs to wake up again if no network I/O occurs.

The problem is, though, that my application is multi-threaded and
there are times where other threads create and destroy timers. When
this happens I need to break out of my select() in the I/O & timer
thread, recalulate the timeout value and then go back to sleep.

Is there a way I can cause a thread to wake up, or does anyone have a
suggestion as how to work around this?

Thanks.

-Richard

[Walter Roberson]

Re: Posix Threads and select()

In article <20080102142437 16807-cisrichard@gmai lcom>,
Richard Cranium <cisrichard@gma il.comwrote:

>I've got one thread in my program meant to maintain a timing subsystem
>and to do network I/O. It uses the select() system call to either wait
>for I/O or "time out" and "handle" some arbitrary "event".

>Is there a way I can cause a thread to wake up, or does anyone have a
>suggestion as how to work around this?

The C programming language does not have threads. Any thread
capabilities you have are the result of system or library
extensions beyond C. I suggest that you check the
comp.programmin g.threads newsgroup.
--
"I will speculate that [...] applications [...] could actually see a
performance boost for most users by going dual-core [...] because it
is running the adware and spyware that [...] are otherwise slowing
down the single CPU that user has today" -- Herb Sutter

[suresh shenoy]

Re: Posix Threads and select()

On Jan 2, 2:24 pm, Richard Cranium <cisrich...@gma il.comwrote:

Hello,
>
I have an interesting problem:
>
I've got one thread in my program meant to maintain a timing subsystem
and to do network I/O.  It uses the select() system call to either wait
for I/O or "time out" and "handle" some arbitrary "event".
>
The timeout value for select() is calculated off of a list of "active
timers" which contains all the necessary information to correctly guess
when select() needs to wake up again if no network I/O occurs.
>
The problem is, though, that my application is multi-threaded  and
there are times where other threads create and destroy timers.  When
this happens I need to break out of my select() in the I/O & timer
thread, recalulate the timeout value and then go back to sleep.
>
Is there a way I can cause a thread to wake up, or does anyone have a
suggestion as how to work around this?
>
Thanks.
>
-Richard

Richard,

I would recommend you to re-think about your design since you have
threads instantiating timers and destroying them.
It would be best if you could create a module which would keep track
of the ticks and use that. Thus everybody can access this module to
get their job done. Even if the thread dies you are not dependent on
it as the timer module is not killed.

Good luck,
Suresh M. Shenoy