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in reply to Re: Perl Threads Boss/Worker Example
in thread Perl Threads Boss/Worker Example

Although I’m very glad for your Meditation and for your thought in posting it, I do think that Tanktalus does have a point worthy of its own meditation.   The number of work units to be done usually ought not to be equivalent to the number of threads to launch to do that work.   In the general case, that strategy does not scale well, and, when it “doesn’t scale,” it tends to “not scale well” rather badly.   A to-do-list based approach, on the other hand, much more closely matches what we tend to do in real life (except when senior management is in a panic...).   The number of workers is established according to the system’s ability to do work efficiently in parallel without interfering with one another by their mere presence.   The size of the to-do-list queue is both unpredictable and unrelated.   When 100 new customers pile into a fast-food restaurant, the establishment does not clone 100 new workers.

Thanks for posting.