Posts with topic 'Concurrency'

One of the reasons few security products work well in busy Linux environments is that they amplify performance risk. You’re popular and your backend’s load is skyrocketing? Well, the typical product is just going to collect more data and do more analysis, which amplifies the degradation.

In the real world, one of the key ways everyone deals with being overloaded is by dropping less essential things.

We can do the same thing with ring buffers, which are fixed-size queues that typically drop old data once they fill up. Yet, they rarely get used outside of single-reader, single-writer scenarios, because it’s hard to build something correct that scales to 1-to-many scenarios, never mind many-to-many scenarios.

Phil Eaton’s book club is starting The Art of Multiprocessor Programming, 2nd Edition , which is a very well regarded textbook, and pretty recently updated (2021). I’ve even heard of a couple of authors.

I’ve done a lot of concurrent programming, and have always felt like I’ve still got plenty to learn, so I was excited for the topic. So far, what I’ve learned is that I would never recommend this book, despite any merits.