On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 10:05:20PM -0400, Scott Gifford wrote:
"Douglas A. Tutty" <dtutty@vianet.ca> writes:
On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 08:17:44PM -0400, Kamaraju S Kusumanchi wrote:
While you may think its terribly inefficient, it isn't really. A fancy
"wait" function is just polling anyway, you're just making it overt.
Just to clarify, wait(2) and the shell wait builtin do not poll, they
instruct the kernel to put the process to sleep until a child process
finishes, then wake it up and return from the wait call. Because of
that they are very efficient. Still, if the programs in question are
doing a great deal of work, the extra work required by polling will
not be very significant in comparison.
Isn't that just passing the polling on to the kernel? At some level,
some process has to see if a pid exists, if not, wait a period, then
check again.
Doug.