On Fri, 16 Mar 2001, Tom Lane wrote:
> Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net> writes:
> >> definitely need before considering this is to replace the existing
> >> spinlock mechanism with something more efficient.
>
> > What sort of problems are you seeing with the spinlock code?
>
> It's great as long as you never block, but it sucks for making things
> wait, because the wait interval will be some multiple of 10 msec rather
> than just the time till the lock comes free.
>
> We've speculated about using Posix semaphores instead, on platforms
> where those are available. I think Bruce was concerned about the
> possible overhead of pulling in a whole thread-support library just to
> get semaphores, however.
But, with shared libraries, are you really pulling in a "whole
thread-support library"? My understanding of shared libraries (altho it
may be totally off) was that instead of pulling in a whole library, you
pulled in the bits that you needed, pretty much as you needed them ...
