My goal was to show that threads don't scale terribly well in terms of processing concurrent I/O, and in particular, Twisted scales better, even in its slowest, most naive mode than a simple threaded implementation of a similar concept.
Unfortunately I was unable to do this easily, because Debian GNU/Linux (in its default configuration, using a 2.6.7 kernel) is not able to even spawn enough threads to generate a fair test.
My test program was to write a Twisted protocol handler that would take some simple input, perform a trivial computation, generate some output, and close the connection. I then wrote a Twisted client for it, and write a simple threaded reactor which would handle each connection in a separate thread, to compare the amount of time each multiplexor took to finish connecting vs. the amount of time it took to complete the entire test. At around 256 threads, though, I could no longer spawn more threads to handle simultaneous connections, a problem which others have experienced.
This indicates in part the cultural issues surrounding the performance of threads, to wit, nobody really cares enough about good threading performance to even bother making it possible to spawn a lot of them.
This test was carried out on an otherwise quiescent Linux machine, a 2000XP+ Athlon with a gig of RAM, using python 2.3. Without further ado:
I don't expect these graphs to be taken as serious performance measurements - after all, I'm not even providing source code yet. Still, the fact that the threading connection-start performance is so abysmally bad (even compared to
select() - remember, this is using Twisted's
default configuration, with no tuning or optimization) and the fact
that with an otherwise excellent development machine I don't even have the
software to test larger numbers of concurrent connections might give you an
idea of why I find it so hard to take this kind of comparison seriously.It has brought to light the fact that although Twisted would be an excellent test platform for different multiplexing mechanisms, nobody has bothered to put together a survey of those yet. I will do a more rigorous benchmark of threads vs. Twisted later this week, release the code, and hopefully some useful work will come of this if it can be used as a simple reactor benchmark.