On Tue, 7 Aug 2012 20:13:35 +0200 manu@xxxxxxxxxx (Emmanuel Dreyfus) wrote: > Anand Avati <anand.avati@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > What was behind the decision to use swapcontext, btw? Why not just > have a thread for each task? I should probably let the authors speak for themselves, but I suspect it's because operations like self-heal and rebalance can be expected to generate a *lot* of sync calls. Threads do still consume non-trivial resources, and switches between them still involve a trip through the scheduler, even if they share an address space etc. I just ran a quick experiment, and ping-ponging between tasks via swapcontext was ~9x as fast as via pthreads. I didn't measure the effect on memory consumption, but it's likely to be at least as large as the effect on execution time.
