[Haskell-cafe] Concurrency questions

[Andrew Coppin]

Spencer Janssen wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 06, 2008 at 11:30:53AM +0000, Andrew Coppin wrote:
>   
>> Just a couple of things I was wondering about...
>>
>> 1. Is there some way to assign a "priority" to Haskell threads? (The 
>> behaviour I'd like is that high priority threads always run first, and low 
>> priority threads potentially never run at all unless there's an available 
>> processor which is completely idle.)
>>     
>
> Not in the current system.  It is not clear that thread priorities are so nice
> anyway (see 'priority inversion' on Wikipedia, for example).
>   

Well, I was thinking more of using them for two things. One is for 
speculative work (i.e., doing work which we might need later - but don't 
bother unless there's cores going spare). The other is for working on 
entirely independent tasks - I don't see how inversion can happen when 
one thread is solving problem X and another is solving problem Y. But 
sure, it certainly adds more complexity to have priority levels.

[I can also imagine situations where you might want to assign 80% CPU to 
one thing, and 20% CPU to the other - but that really does sound hard to 
implement...]

>> 2. I have a situation where I have a thread generating some data and 
>> putting it into a mutable array, and another thread trying to read that 
>> data. Is there a way I can make the reader thread block if it tries to read 
>> a cell that hasn't been computed yet, but not introduce too much overhead 
>> for cells that have been filled in?
>>     
>
> I'd probably use an Array of TMVars, they should be faster than MVars when
> multiple threads are reading simultaneously.
>   

Mmm, OK. I'll try that. (I wasn't actually aware that STM is working yet...)

>> 3. Would it be hard to make it so that the number of real threads (the RTS 
>> +N flag) could be adjusted at runtime?
>>     
>
> I don't know whether it is hard, but I do know that it would be useful!
>   

;-)