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Jan Danielsson wrote:
> Thomas E. Spanjaard wrote:
>> Jan Danielsson wrote:
>>>[...]
>>>So rather than threading on these platforms, we
>>>made Tor fork new processes. This means you need way more memory to run
>>>a Tor server, especially an exit server. If you want to run a Tor
>>>server, we recommend you upgrade to a better OS."
>>>[...]
>>If Tor soups up that many threads cq. processes, it sounds like a very
>>wrong design decision, they should use an event loop instead. So the
>>'upgrade to a better OS' is completely out of line.
>    That comment is out of line regardless, imho. OS advocacy should not
> be in a TOR wiki. But maybe that's just me.

Agreed.

>    Anyway, it turns out they are building an DNS resolver into the
> application which will be used instead of the operating system function.
> 
>    I'm curious though, what is meant by an "event loop" in this context?
> Link to relevant documentation?

The first paragraph of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_loop is 
helpful. Instead of having the separate threads, the handlers for events 
are called from an event loop, optionally preempted as well (or have one 
separate worker thread/process). Things like DNS lookups can be called 
from a wrapper which is reentrant by using a context structure (like in 
reentrant coroutines), which puts way less load on a system than a 
bucket of threads or processes.

Cheers,
-- 
         Thomas E. Spanjaard
         tgen@netphreax.net

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