Re: Steve Jobs very very interested.

"Dave Jewell" <Dave.Jewell@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4418608b@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I'm not certain what the issue is with Forte Agent, but sometimes I might
not look at a group for several weeks, and then when I come back to it,
there can be zilions of new messages. Agent just gives me some lame
message along the lines of "Forget it, loser, too many headers to
download". The only option is to then do a catch up, which of course
means that I've lost all those headers I specifically wanted to see. I
use GigaNews which has over 60 days binary retention and close to 1000
days for text messages, so it's dead easy to get into this kind of
situation. I just think that Agent is badly written, to be honest; the
back-end database just doesn't seem to be able to cope with so many
records

Interesting. My newsreader currently has a database of over 10GB, and runs
fine. They probably chose some hokey home-grown database structure, or they
simply did not know how to optimize it well. I wonder if this resulted from
their need to be cross-platform. (My newsreader is Win32 only, so I could
use the best embedded database I could find at the time: NexusDB.)

and when it *is* munching through a
large newsgroup, the front-end GUI virtually freezes completely which
implies poor threading design.

They completely rewrote Agent from scratch using cross-platform C++ about a
year or two ago. You'd think they would try to get the multi-threading thing
right if they were going to go through all the bother of a complete
rewrite. But it is surprising how many apps freeze during a major operation.
A lot of developers are deathly afraid of multi-threading. I can somewhat
understand their position, as it is a lot of work to do multithreading
right, and it requires a lot more patience while debugging and testing.
Plus, there is a definite trade-off involved, of course. If you write an app
to be heavily multi-threaded and thus well-suited for curent and future
chips it will not run as well on an older single-threaded CPU. All the
context-switching will really clobber it.


Unison (on the Mac) makes heavy use of threading and seems to do the job
properly. I can be (a) downloading three or four files simultaneously
while (b) retrieving new headers for another group while (c) searching for
text string in the headers of yet another group. It never misses a beat.
Then again, it ain't Windows. ;-))

Ah, not so fast, sir. My newsreader makes heavy use of multithreading and it
CAN do all the stuff you mention above, on Windows XP. It is not Windows
versus MacOS that is the issue here. It is good-design running on good
hardware, versus bad design running on anything, if I may toot my own horn.
Of course, if anyone tries my newsreader on a single non-hyperthreaded CPU
they will not see the advantage as much as someone running it on a multicore
cpu with a ton of RAM.

This whole multi-threaded thing is one reason why good, well-written apps in
..NET SHOULD be fast and snappy in appearance, since .NET has excellent
support for multithreading. But the reality will of course be different,
because the same bunch of incompetent boobs that were coding poorly in Win32
are now all coding poorly in C# instead.


.

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