<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 6:28 PM, Oliver Hunt <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:oliver@apple.com">oliver@apple.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div style="word-wrap: break-word;">I believe that this will be difficult to have such a limit as sites may rely on GC to collect Workers that are no longer running (so number of running threads is non-deterministic), and in the context of mix source content ("mash-ups") it will be difficult for any content source to be sure it isn't going to contribute to that limit. Obviously a UA shouldn't crash, but i believe that it is up to the UA to determine how to achieve this -- eg. having a limit to allow a 1:1 relationship between workers and processes will have a much lower limit than an implementation that has a worker per thread model, or an m:n relationship between workers and threads/processes. Having the specification limited simply because one implementation mechanism has certain limits when there are many alternative implementation models seems like a bad idea.</div>
</blockquote><div><br>Where in his email does Dmitry advocate upper limits?<br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div style="word-wrap: break-word;">
<div></div><div>I believe if there's going to be any worker related limits, it should realistically be a lower limit on the number of workers rather than an upper.</div></div></blockquote><div><br>Perhaps lower limits on how many workers are 'guaranteed' to be available would be good, but that's fairly orthogonal to the original email. What he's proposing is a way to gracefully rate limit the number of workers rather than having the OS running out of resources rate limit it.<br>
<br>I for one like the proposal and the analogy to what happens when you issue 10,000 XHRs at once.<br><br>J<br><br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div style="word-wrap: break-word;"><div><div><div class="h5"><div><div><div>On Jun 9, 2009, at 6:13 PM, Dmitry Titov wrote:</div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>Hi WHATWG!</div><div><br></div><div>In Chromium, workers are going to have their separate processes, at least for now. So we quickly found that "while(true) foo = new Worker(...)" quickly consumes the OS resources :-) In fact, this will kill other browsers too, and on some systems the unbounded number of threads will effectively "freeze" the system beyond the browser. </div>
<div><br></div><div>We think about how to reasonably place limits on the resources consumed by 'sea of workers'. Obviously, one could just limit a maxumum number of parallel workers available to page or domain or browser. But what do you do when a limit is reached? The Worker() constructor could return null or throw exception. However, that seems to go against the spirit of the spec since it usually does not deal with resource constraints. So it makes sense to look for the most sensible implementation that tries best to behave.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Current idea is to let create as many Worker objects as requested, but not necessarily start them right away. So the resources are not allocated except the thin JS wrapper. As long as workers terminate and the number of them decreases below the limit, more workers from the "ready queue" could be started. This allows to support implementation limits w/o exposing them.</div>
<div><br></div><div>This is similar to how a 'sea of XHRs' would behave. The test page <a href="http://www.figushki.com/test/xhr/xhr10000.html" target="_blank">here</a> creates 10,000 async XHR requests to distinct URLs and then waits for all of them to complete. While it's obviosuly impossible to have 10K http connections in parallel, all XHRs will be completed, given time.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Does it sound like a good way to avoid the resource crunch due to high number of workers?</div><div><br></div><div>Thanks,</div><div>Dmitry</div><div><br></div></blockquote></div><br></div></div></div>
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