From: Wink Saville <wink@...>
Date: 2005-10-20T12:57:22+09:00
Subject: Re: wxruby unfriendly to Ruby threads?

Guillaume Marcais wrote:

>I have a GUI application with a bunch of threads proxying network
>information around. But the network communication seems very slow if not
>stopped. To make sure, I added a "keep alive" thread:
>
>Thread.new do
>  loop do
>    puts("Keep alive #{Time.now}")
>    sleep 1
>  end
>end
>
>This thread hangs after a little while and stop outputting anything. If
>I move the mouse over the window, a bunch of lines are printed by the
>keep alive thread, all at once with the same time, and then it hangs
>until the next GUI event.
>
>Is this a known problem? Or am I completely misguided?
>
>Guillaume.
>
>
>  
>
On my system running windows I need to redefine puts as below to flush 
the output:

def puts(s)
  STDOUT.puts(s)
  STDOUT.flush
end

As for the threads, how many is a bunch? I've been looking at the 
scheduler and it looks to me that each time a thread is scheduled the 
entire list of threads is looped through at least twice and as many as 5 
times. I'm looking into other possible algorithms, but I'm a newbie so 
not sure what progress I'll make. But it looks to be an interesting 
problem and I believe it is solvable.

Cheers,

Wink