Nice to know about this Smalltalk session. Didn't knew about that. BTW, did a debug it and it froze my image in a BlockClosure>>newProcess Phil 2013/2/21 Igor Stasenko <siguctua@gmail.com>:
On 21 February 2013 12:36, Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven@stfx.eu> wrote:
Yes, I think you are right: the ambiguity is plain wrong, and even then not saving and continuing them sounds reasonable.
But what about the inverse: you schedule something that should happen every hour or every day, you save/restart the image and with the new approach these would all run immediately, right ?
well, but in this case, once you will know that all delays is released on image restart, you can always check for session change before doing any action.. for example:
[ | session | session := Smalltalk session.
1 hour asDelay wait.
"is session changed?" session == Smalltalk session ifFalse: [ "perhaps we should abandon the loop here and reload/reinitialize stuff in some higher layers of code" ].
self doSomething.
] repeat.
Why this "perhaps we should abandon the loop here and reload/reinitialize stuff in some higher layers of code".. because any resident code (like forked process with infinite loop) is a common source of nasty problems, unreliable behavior and usually hard to debug (especially over multiple sessions or when you changing the code which it should run)..
And to my thinking, writing a proper session-aware code is a way to go, instead of relying on ambiguous things.
So not only would you kill delays that are too short (reasonable), but collapse the longer ones.
In terms of design: I think the different behaviors should be implemented with different objects.
On 21 Feb 2013, at 12:28, Igor Stasenko <siguctua@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi.
There is one thing which is IMO an over-engineering artifact: - when system goes down (image shutdown), all currently scheduled delays are "saved" and then when image starting up they are rescheduled again to keep waiting what time is left for delay..
But the problem is that it does not takes into account the total time an image was frozen, and the requirement is quite ambiguous:
- if you put a process on a delay for 5 minutes, then immediately save image, and then restart it 10 minutes (or 1 year) after, should this delay keep waiting for 4 +x seconds which is left? Or should we consider this delay as utterly expired? (and as you can see, the answer is different, if we counting time using real, physical time, or just image uptime).
And why counting image uptime? Consider use cases, like connection timeout.. it is all about real time , right here , right now.. will it matter to get socket connection timeout error when you restart some image 1 year after? Please, give me a scenario, which will illustrate that we cannot live without it and should count image uptime for delays, because i can't find one.
If not, then to my opinion, and to simplify all logic inside delay code, i would go straight and declare following: - when new image session starts, all delays, no matter for how long they are scheduled to wait are considered expired (and therefore all waiting processes is automatically resumed).
Because as tried to demonstrate, the meaning of delay which spans over multiple image sessions is really fuzzy and i would be really surprised to find a code which relies on such behavior.
This change will also can be helpful with terminating all processes which were put on wait for too long (6304550344559763 milliseconds) by mistake or such.
-- Best regards, Igor Stasenko.
-- Best regards, Igor Stasenko.