I have been using the feeds aggregator BeginEnd.net as more than just a news aggregator, it is also a Canary: once a new version of DWScript passes tests, it goes live there!
Latest Canary feature is for the new FastMM4 multi-threading improvements by Primož Gabrijelčič, which can be found under the Locking Improvements branch.
An utility that was added to the DWScript sample WebServer during the 4 TeraPixel Mandelbrot experiment is the BackgroundWorkers API.
This is a rather low-level threading facility that can work well with Global Queues to handle background tasks or serializing tasks.
I recently posted abut the new Slim R/W Locks introduced with Vista, and how they were vastly more efficient than TMREWS.
Apparently, they’re also more efficient than Critical Sections…
Here are a few findings on Multi-Read Exclusive-Write Synchronizer from a recent upgrade of DWScript‘s GlobalVar functions.
I ran some comparisons between a plain Critical Section, Delphi’s TMultiReadExclusiveWriteSynchronizer and Windows Slim Reader/Writer Lock, of which an implementation was added to the dwsXPlatform unit.
SamplingProfiler has a few options to help profile a multi-threaded application which I’ll go over here.
In the current version, those options allow identifying CPU-related bottlenecks, as in “threads taking too much CPU resources or execution time”. However, they do not provide much clues yet to pinpoint bottlenecks arising from thread synchronization issues or serialization (insufficient parallelism). Hopefully, more support for profiling multi-threaded applications will come in future versions.