[SR-Dev] [Kamailio-Devel] register_timer versus register_timer_process

[Andrei Pelinescu-Onciul]

On Mar 09, 2009 at 22:14, Ovidiu Sas <osas at voipembedded.com> wrote:
> Should I understand that in ser there are two timer processes:
>  - fast timer
>  - slow timer
> 
> If this is correct, I would like to have the ability to register an
> extra process for particular timer.
> On a multicore platform, several timers can be processed in parallel.
> Under heavy load, I experienced issues while using the standard timer
> process for the ratelimit module and therefore I registered the
> ratelimit timer with it's own process.

Could you describe what is the ratelimit timer doing  and how
often is it called?
(there are huge differences between the timer in k and sr, the timer in
k is very inefficient and that's what you might have seen).

Anyway so far I've seen register_timer_process used only in 5 modules
and I suspect in the worst case it can be replaced by fork_process();
while() { sleep(1); call_timer())} (which is basically what
register_timer_process does). For this I wouldn't create a special
function.
If the needs arrives for more complex timers (ones that handle several
different timeouts or need dynamically adding and removing), I will add
something similar (based on local_timer.h), but that would return a
timer_proc_handle so that more timers can be added to it at runtime
(even from different processes if proper locking is used).


Andrei