From: Tom Reilly <w3gat@...>
Date: 2010-03-09T08:13:41+09:00
Subject: Re: asynchronous network access with Rack?

I've used threading with getting several web pages for a long time and 
I've never had any problem so long as you catch errors if a specifc web 
page can't be obtained.
Tom Reilly

Nick Brown wrote:
> I've read that "threading is considered harmful" for Ruby web apps.
> Well, I'm writing a Sinatra app which will build a page based on the
> responses of several servers (Net::HTTP.get). I want to do these .gets
> in parallel, as doing them synchronously would obviously mean the users
> would wait for a long time.
>
> Would it be "considered harmful" to do:
>
>    resp_a, resp_b, resp_c = nil
>    thread_a = Thread.new { resp_a = Net::HTTP.get site_a }
>    thread_b = Thread.new { resp_b = Net::HTTP.get site_b }
>    thread_c = Thread.new { resp_c = Net::HTTP.get site_c }
>    thread_a.join
>    thread_b.join
>    thread_c.join
>
> Is there any possible harm that could come from this? Can threading
> interfere with Rack in some way? I haven't done much previous
> development of threaded apps, so I would appreciate any tips.
>