On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 6:27 PM, Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven@stfx.eu> wrote:

> On 20 Feb 2017, at 10:30, Pavel Krivanek <pavel.krivanek@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> 2017-02-20 10:27 GMT+01:00 Guillermo Polito <guillermopolito@gmail.com>:
> As far as I remember, the main problem was not bandwidth but a blocking and non-responsive UI.
> Imagine I'm in the university, or in a company with a proxy. And I forget to set the proxy. Then, while spotter tries to fetch catalog entries, it would block the image and throw a timeout error some minutes after.
>
> So, maybe for the future and besides Ben's C option (which I like) I have a
>
> D) Load catalog entries in background in a non-blocking way
>�� - and while catalog entries are not yet available, they should not be shown
>
> AFIK the main problem was that there was not possilbe to do it non-blocking way.

Yes that is true. (It is actually DNS resolving that is blocked in some freak case).

In �� sqUnixSocket.c �� I read...

��* Notes:

��* �� Sockets are completely asynchronous, but the resolver is still synchronous.

So does this mean that if for any reason the resolver��primitive��takes a long time to respond,

the whole VM is blocked? Thus forking the Catalog loading in another thread would have no benefit?

Would having the resolver coded purely in-Image behave better?��

So a slow name resolution would not hold up the whole image if it happened in a forked thread.

I found such an implementation in OpenCobalt and after some minor cleanup basic operations work fine.

http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~BenComan/DNS/

cheers -ben

��

But the thing is, the problematic situation only occurs for a very small percentage of people, like less than 1%, probably even much less. (Remember, nobody can produce a repeatable case for it).

So the question is, is that enough reason to act as if we are still in the 90's when internet was a luxury and cut features that depend on it ? If you have no network today, you're in big trouble anyway. (Again, if you turn off your network, no blocking will happen at all, try it).

So what is more important ? The general functionality of the 99.xxx % or the unreproducible freak case ?