[Gnash-dev] performance and blocking I/O

[Eric Hughes]

At 10:44 AM 5/4/2007, strk wrote:
> I've tried mapping youtube.com to localhost and providing RMS.flv as 
> get_video.
> CPU usage is at most 15% with this setup, so the problem is *definitely*
> in loading/decoding process.

I can't help very specifically yet, since I'm deep in cygnal code.  I can 
say that I threw out network.cpp entirely because I couldn't figure out how 
to do asynchronous I/O using it with less work than writing from 
scratch.  And furthermore I don't know enough about the details of your 
profiling to have an assurance that I really know what I'm talking about 
here.  Thus take the following advice _cum grano salis_.

Have you all specifically measured how much time is spent within blocking 
reads?  The issue is CPU-time vs. real-time, that is, how much time is 
spent doing reads vs. how much time waiting for them to complete.  Reading 
the comment above, it struck me that this might be the difference.

If it is, I'd recommended fixing this _after_ the next release point.  I'm 
doing single-threaded, asynchronous and non-blocking I/O in the server.  We 
can reuse the same I/O library and scheduling discipline in the client as 
well, but my code isn't mature enough to even start this elsewhere in the 
code yet.

Eric