On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 08:06, David Leimbach
I think you just said the same thing I just said. So are we arguing? I'm kind of confused. "If some computation needs to be performed, a thread is spawned" is very similar to what I just said about multiplexing the signal handling into one thread and spawning worker threads. I never mentioned a thread pool, and agree with you that it probably doesn't make any sense in this discussion. It might just be that I don't know anything about your DBus library that's causing this discussion to go this way. Let me look at it and get back to you.
This might be a terminology problem. A "signal handler" is a computation (an IO value) which is performed when a signal message is received. It doesn't make any sense to run signal handlers in one thread, because each handler might take an arbitrary amount of time to execute. I read your email as suggesting that handlers should be run in a single thread, with additional threads being pooled/spawned when the developer suspects some handler might take a significant amount of time. In theory this would be identical to giving each handler its own thread, but I suspect that it would simply make it more likely for inexperienced developers to accidentally block their socket.