On Fri, 14 Nov 2003, Eric Dahlman wrote:

> Another problem with doing this is that you are tying the rate at which 
> file descriptors are closed to the GC profile of your program.  If you 
> only have 10's or 100's of file descriptors available it would be very 
> easy to use them all up in a tight loop which did not allocate much memory.
> 
> It would be a bummer to have your program start failing because you used 
> a more memory efficient algorithm for some calculation.

This is easy enough to work around- have the file open try a GC if the 
file open fails.  Alternatively, you could simply require programs that 
want to sit in tight loops opening descriptors to handle the out of 
descriptors case.  Java does #2, IIRC.

-- 
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                                - Gene Spafford 
Brian

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