[Live-devel] Threads and event loops

[Ross Finlayson]

>I followed all the posts about threading and event loops some days 
>ago. I also reviewed the FAQ once more and because I had done it 
>several times in the past, it seems to me that the recommendation 
>"Such a configuration is not recommended, however; instead, it is 
>safer to structure such an application as multiple processes, not 
>multiple threads." has been added recently and was not there just 
>some weeks ago. Am I right?

Yes.


>When this configuration (more event loops running in separate 
>threads with dedicated usage environments and task schedulers) is 
>not recommended any more, it is bad news for us because our 
>application is structured exactly in this configuration.

Don't worry - I just said "not recommended", not "you cannot do this" 
(which I couldn't enforce anyway, because this is Open Source :-)


>  Nevertheless, we have not seen any problems in this configuration 
>so far, in our tests we are running up to 20 threads in one process, 
>each thread is responsible for exactly one RTSP server. Could you, 
>please, be more specific why this configuration is not recommended? 
>Are there any known problems with this configuration? (I think the 
>problem can be some static variables but since we compiled the 
>live555 code to a Windows COM library and create one instance of a 
>COM object for each RTSP client, maybe the static variables are not 
>touched by other instances, but I am not sure about this).

We recently saw a problem (with multiple threads in a single process) 
caused by a static variable.  There might be others; I can't say for 
sure.


>Finally, according to my opinion, this approach is far better than 
>having just one thread to be responsible for many RTSP servers 
>because the code contains blocking operations

Yes, the current implementation of "RTSPClient" is inadequate 
(because it contains blocking operations).  This is being fixed 
(please be patient :-)
-- 

Ross Finlayson
Live Networks, Inc.
http://www.live555.com/
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