Why Events Are A Bad Idea (for High-concurrency Servers)

["Beton, Richard" <richard.beton@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Something for discussion:
Paper presented at Usenix HotOS 2003, conference on hot topics in OS.

"Event-based programming has been highly touted in recent years as the
best way to write highly concurrent applications. Having worked on
several of these systems, we now believe this approach to be a mistake.
Specifically, we believe that threads can achieve all of the strengths
of events, including support for high concurrency, low overhead, and a
simple concurrency model. Moreover, we argue that threads allow a
simpler and more natural programming style."

100,000 user level threads in a web server, achieving high performance.
Compiler support for concurrency is deemed desirable, a fruitful
research area.
http://www.usenix.org/events/hotos03/tech/vonbehren.html

An interesting follow-up to Ousterhout's 1996 Usenix talk "Why threads
are a bad idea (for most purposes)".
http://home.pacbell.net/ouster/threads.pdf

cheers,
Rick

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