[Stackless] Context Switching and Queues

[Andrew Francis]

Hello Colleagues:

I benchmarked my Solution.py (minus the getPage()
call) against a more conventional Stackless/Twisted
programme. Although Solution.py is crudely written and
does more, it is roughly three times slower. Although
performance is not a big issue for me, I have started
to wonder about some things:

1) What are the fundamentals of designing a "reactor"
that inter-operates with Stackless.
2) How to speed up my current implementation.

Examining my code, I noticed the following pattern:

def producer():
  
    # produce some output ...

    for channel in channels:
        channel.send(someThing)

    # the producer does not want a response from the
consumer

    stackless.schedule()

Both my reactor and scheduler/timer routines have this
pattern. In the case of the reactor, the
stackless.schedule() is necessary to give other
tasklets that can run, a chance to run. The important
point is each time, a channel.send occurs, the
producer is re-scheduled. I felt there was needless
context switching.  

I did a simple test. One involving using channels. The
other involving queues (note - I know uthread has a
Queue class). The queue example was on average, 66%
faster. I am assuming the overhead comes from the
needless context switching.  It would be nice if folks
could look at the code and see if there are any
mistakes in the thinking.

I figure that the test provides insights into how to
support "producer" tasklets and "broadcasting." . 

Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Andrew






       
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