non-blocking writing to file ...

[Benjamin Goldberg]

Dieter D'Hoker wrote:

>
> I write a gameserver written in perl ,
> so pign is very important ,

What is "pign" ?

> every 15 minutes it writes winlist , configuration ,s tatistics ,
> profiles , ... to different files ...
> It takes some time to do so , so if there was a game goign on at that
> moment it will "block" for a some time .
> (not that much the files aren't that big but still ...)

You may be able to cut down the speed of this by opening the filehandles
once when your program starts, and never closing them. After each time
that you write all your stuff to a particular file, seek() that handle
back to the beginning.

> Now I first tried it to make it non-bloking by forking my server ,
> and writing the file in my child ,

This will only improve your program's speed if you do it on unix, where
real fork()ing exists -- if you're on windows, fork() is emulated using
something called "ithreads." Although ithreads provides much of the
functionality of fork, the startup time is quite big.

Oh, and it will only help the program's speed if the data segment of a
process's memory is copied using copy-on-write.

> but that even results in even more time lost I noticed ,
> I guess because it has to copy the entire server into memory ,
> and the server does take quite an amount of ram ...
>
> next option would be using threading ,
> but becaus emy shell doesn't support threading this is not an option
> ...

If this were C, then threads would be your best bet.

Or possibly posix AIO, or some other asynchronous IO module.

> maybe there is a module that can do this ?

To magically speed up your program? Not likely.

> or some other method ?

Besides keeping the filehandles open, you might consider writing the
data only at times when a delay won't be noticable.

Also, writing a little data at a time might help -- just write the
winlist, and then later on, just write the configuration, then later on,
just write the statistics, etc.

> I thought of preforkign a child , running a server on the child ,
> where the parent can conenct to from time to time passing thourgh the
> files , and the the child saves them , but that's kinda complicated do
> do I guess
> ...

Not just complicated, but (even ignoring the overhead of preforking and
connecting), you still will need to transfer the data from the parent to
the child!

> any ideas ?
> or examples of code ?

--
$a=24;split//,240513;s/\B/ => /for@@=qw(ac ab bc ba cb ca
);{push(@b,$a),($a-=6)^=1 for 2..$a/6x--$|;print "$@[$a%6
]\n";((6<=($a-=6))?$a+=$_[$a%6]-$a%6:($a=pop @b))&&redo;}

[Benjamin Goldberg]

Dieter D'Hoker wrote:

>
> I write a gameserver written in perl ,
> so pign is very important ,

What is "pign" ?

> every 15 minutes it writes winlist , configuration ,s tatistics ,
> profiles , ... to different files ...
> It takes some time to do so , so if there was a game goign on at that
> moment it will "block" for a some time .
> (not that much the files aren't that big but still ...)

You may be able to cut down the speed of this by opening the filehandles
once when your program starts, and never closing them. After each time
that you write all your stuff to a particular file, seek() that handle
back to the beginning.

> Now I first tried it to make it non-bloking by forking my server ,
> and writing the file in my child ,

This will only improve your program's speed if you do it on unix, where
real fork()ing exists -- if you're on windows, fork() is emulated using
something called "ithreads." Although ithreads provides much of the
functionality of fork, the startup time is quite big.

Oh, and it will only help the program's speed if the data segment of a
process's memory is copied using copy-on-write.

> but that even results in even more time lost I noticed ,
> I guess because it has to copy the entire server into memory ,
> and the server does take quite an amount of ram ...
>
> next option would be using threading ,
> but becaus emy shell doesn't support threading this is not an option
> ...

If this were C, then threads would be your best bet.

Or possibly posix AIO, or some other asynchronous IO module.

> maybe there is a module that can do this ?

To magically speed up your program? Not likely.

> or some other method ?

Besides keeping the filehandles open, you might consider writing the
data only at times when a delay won't be noticable.

Also, writing a little data at a time might help -- just write the
winlist, and then later on, just write the configuration, then later on,
just write the statistics, etc.

> I thought of preforkign a child , running a server on the child ,
> where the parent can conenct to from time to time passing thourgh the
> files , and the the child saves them , but that's kinda complicated do
> do I guess
> ...

Not just complicated, but (even ignoring the overhead of preforking and
connecting), you still will need to transfer the data from the parent to
the child!

> any ideas ?
> or examples of code ?

--
$a=24;split//,240513;s/\B/ => /for@@=qw(ac ab bc ba cb ca
);{push(@b,$a),($a-=6)^=1 for 2..$a/6x--$|;print "$@[$a%6
]\n";((6<=($a-=6))?$a+=$_[$a%6]-$a%6:($a=pop @b))&&redo;}