Thread pooling in AIO?

[David M. Lloyd]

On 12/16/2008 12:41 PM, Alan Bateman wrote:
> David M. Lloyd wrote:
>> I think a fixed pool is probably the wrong choice for async I/O - it 
>> would make more sense to use a cached pool which can scale up on 
>> demand, with a sensible timeout for non-core threads.
> If the server is completely event driven then a fixed thread pool can 
> work very well.
> 
> One word of warning is one needs to be careful to avoid idle 
> timeout/keep alive on Windows due to the way that I/O works on that 
> platform. I/O operations are tied in the kernel to the initiating 
> thread; if a thread terminates (because it is idle) then outstanding I/O 
> operations that it has initiated may be aborted.

Interesting.  To me that suggests that there ought to be a special Executor 
or ThreadFactory implementation for the Windows case then - one which knows 
not to kill a thread if there's an outstanding operation on it.

- DML