Threading on Linux

Hello all!

With multi-cpu machines getting more and more common
(our company is currently running its ASP software on
a 4x CPU), I'm wondering if there are any plans for
an upcoming version of Lispworks on Linux to use
native threads, to take full advantage of multiple processors?

Shall we be reduced to switch to (shudder) Windows?

[Our current hack to solve this is to run 4 copies of the
 software, and carefully partition the traffic to them].

Any inside scoop?

Cheers,
					Alain Picard

Re: Threading on Linux

> With multi-cpu machines getting more and more common
> (our company is currently running its ASP software on
> a 4x CPU), I'm wondering if there are any plans for
> an upcoming version of Lispworks on Linux to use
> native threads, to take full advantage of multiple processors?

Even on Windows there is only one Lisp thread running at the same time.

> Shall we be reduced to switch to (shudder) Windows?

For a server, it's probably a bad idea. ;-)

> [Our current hack to solve this is to run 4 copies of the
>  software, and carefully partition the traffic to them].

That's also what I do. I use mod_lisp to partition the webapp part of the
server over several Lisp processes so that's transparent to the user. (As
the HTTP handling is done by Apache/mod_lisp, Lisp resources are only used
for the webapp)

> Any inside scoop?

Cheers,

Marc

Re: Threading on Linux

* Alain Picard wrote:

> With multi-cpu machines getting more and more common
> (our company is currently running its ASP software on
> a 4x CPU), I'm wondering if there are any plans for
> an upcoming version of Lispworks on Linux to use
> native threads, to take full advantage of multiple processors?

> Shall we be reduced to switch to (shudder) Windows?

Does the Windows one actually use threading in an interesting way or
does it do the single-big-lock-around-the-heap trick?  I got the
impression (though I am not sure from where) that it did that.

--tim