I’ve been experimenting on multi-threading in perl for a new project, and am impressed with how straightforward it is. Before digging into it, I never really considered doing anything with it because it was always kindof ‘mysterious’ to me. Now, I’m seeing how useful it is to have multiple threads that are able to share variables.
In the application I’m rewriting, I used to have one script that listened for network data, then saved that out to a file. I had another script that read through the output files, and then inserted the data into a database. Now, with a multi-threaded program, I just have one thread that listens, and another thread (or multiple threads) that parse the data and manipulate it however I want. In this case, that saves a lot of disk activity, and makes the program a lot more efficient, and straight-forward.
I’m also able to use the Thread::Queue module to create a queue that the listener process can add to, and then have ‘worker’ threads that can go through the data and format/summarize/whatever I’m going to do with it.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this all works out. I’m impressed so far.