Notes

[translated roughly from Hebrew]

Introduction

• Name: Moshe Zadka
• Twisted developer [Debian, Python]
• Not:
  • XML talk (XML is: standarised, flexibl, internationalized)
  • Gettysburg in Power Point
  • Touching lots of things briefly
How to do more than one thing at once?
• Fork (Apache)
• Thread (AOLServer)
• Cheat (GUI programs)
• Main loop calling our code.
• Let's develop a network program!

Discussion

• What is blocking?
  • There is a UNIX concept of blocking...
  • ...which is not really relevant.
  • Connecting to an accepting UNIX domain socket is blocking...
  • ...reading a file from NFS is not.
• Wait a minute: why is that interesting?
  • GUI -- humans (0.1s-1s)
  • Network: connections might get refused
• Typical scenario: listen buffer 5, 1e6 connections/day -- don't dawdle for more than 0.08s
• These are the numbers that matter!
• Useful criterion: blocking==takes more than 0.01s on normal load.
• Depends on hardware, etc.
• Real world :(
• But a useful rule of thumb when coding.
• Trick: reactor.callLater(0,)
• Continuation-passing-style, tail-call-optimization
• But not pure -- not optimal

References

• Plonk
• twistedmatrix.com
• mailing list
• irc -- #twisted