From: "Zed A. Shaw" <zedshaw@...>
Date: 2005-09-18T02:17:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Some interesting criticisms of rails

Robert, where's the logical proof that distributed locking to control access to a shared resource is always faster than using a centralized server?  I'm curious if one exists.

On Sat, 17 Sep 2005 18:51:35 +0900
"Robert Klemme" <bob.news@gmx.net> wrote:

> Zed A. Shaw <zedshaw@zedshaw.com> wrote:
> First of all it's five philosophers (i.e. as far as I remeber it's important 
> that the number of resource aquisitors is odd).  Then of course this just 
> serves as an illustrating example.  The problem of shared resource access is 
> all too common in CS (for example in databases).  You cannot solve it by 
> introducing a centralized server because that creates a bottleneck which 
> defies the purpose of parallel processing.  Your waiter is not the best 
> solution.  If you're interested in more details about how for example RDBMS 
> solve this there's a lot of resources out there to read on.
> 
> I don't know why think you have to rant about real CS problems or 
> communists.  This is not an excercise to plague students but it's a real 
> issue and an important problem which must be solved.  Without real solutions 
> your OS would likely perform much worse than it actually does.
> 
> Regards
> 
>     robert
> 
>