Capriccio: scalable threads for internet services

This paper presents Capriccio, a scalable thread package for use with high-concurrency servers. While recent work has advocated event-based systems, we believe that threadbased systems can provide a simpler programming model that achieves equivalent or superior performance. By implementing Capriccio as a user-level thread package, we have decoupled the thread package implementation from the underlying operating system. As a result, we can take advantage of cooperative threading, new asynchronous I/O mechanisms, and compiler support. Using this approach, we are able to provide three key features: (1) scalability to 100,000 threads, (2) efficient stack management, and (3) resource-aware scheduling. We introduce linked stack management, which minimizes the amount of wasted stack space by providing safe, small, and non-contiguous stacks that can grow or shrink at run time. A compiler analysis makes our stack implementation efficient and sound. We also present resource-aware scheduling, wh...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: SOSP
• Authors: J. Robert von Behren, Jeremy Condit, Feng Zhou, George C. Necula, Eric A. Brewer
• Keywords: Cooperative Thread Package, Operating System, Resource-aware Scheduling, SOSP 2003, User-level Thread Package