» Monday, 19 March A.D. 2007
transactions and tickless bombs
Apparently Ebay doesn't use database transactions in their web work. Seems that at the scale at which Ebay operates, transactions would slow them down too much. What I want to know is whether the people trumpeting transactional memory as the solution to our concurrent programming woes have anything to say about this. Perhaps the same troubles might follow when you start to do complicated things with memory transactions, yes?
The real answer, of course, is to eliminate all shared mutable state, but that's a little too radical, I'm afraid.
In other news, if I ever make a short film, I will write it around a supervillian who invents a new Unbeatable Weapon: the Tickless Bomb. An absolutely featureless box that eschews das blikenlights and silences the ever-presenting ticking that accompanies bombs in movie presentations. There will be no access panels leading to crucial wires inside the bomb. Our Hero will be absolutely stymied, as he will have none of the usual cues that enable him to defuse the bomb.
posted by Nate @ 8:49AM