http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=291462


in reply to Introduction to Parallel::ForkManager

Nice introductory tutorial biosysadmin, but I'd like to hear more about your experiences using the module. I assume this tutorial has stemmed from your question Best Practices for Uncompressing/Recompressing Files? Did using Parallel::ForkManager provide a good solution to your problem? How did it perfom?

Cheers!

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Re: Re: Introduction to Parallel::ForkManager
by biosysadmin (Deacon) on Sep 15, 2003 at 05:38 UTC
    You are correct, I have used the module just as described in the referenced node. I'm planning on writing up a synopsis of what I had to do, how I did it, and how it all works and stick it under craft.

    However, since you asked here's a short answer. I did use Parallel::ForkManager to solve my problem, I followed the following suggestions from the thread:
    • I uncompressed each file to a temporary location (not /tmp) and then deleted it after the reformatting was through.
    • I made sure that the temporary location was on a different physical drive from the permanent location for the formatted files.
    • I rewrote my program to divide the work into 4 distinct sets, and then forked a process for each set.
    • I switched to the GNU version of gzip because of this reply (the GNU version is supposedly faster).
    • I staggered the initiation of the threads by sleeping for 60 seconds to try and avoid competition for disk I/O.
    There's a bit more about the optimization that I've done, but look for it under Craft in the next few weeks.