[libmicrohttpd] Thread Pooling

[Richard Alimi]

Hi All,

First of all, thank you for a wonderful library! We're currently using this in 
our implementation of P4P, which is a way for ISPs to provide network 
information to help applications optimize network usage (e.g., peer selection 
in BitTorrent).

You can probably imagine in this use case that we need the ability to scale to 
a large number of users.  Thus, I'm quite interested in the epoll() 
enhancement that has been proposed.  I've currently got a patch (currently 
against SVN Revision 7728) to implement thread pooling. It basically operates 
by spawning a fixed (configurable) number of threads at startup, and each 
thread handles a single connection at a time.  Thus, it is basically 
THREAD_PER_CONNECTION mode without the overhead of spawning new threads upon 
accepting a new connection.

Ideally, this would be extended to be able to spawn multiple threads, and 
within each thread use select() (or epoll()) to handle multiple connections 
simultaneously.

So, there are basically two questions:

1) Is there interest in merging a patch for the current thread pooling 
implementation?  If so, I'll be more than happy to clean it up, update to the 
current SVN revision, and submit.

2) Is there interest in extending it to support multiple connections within 
each thread? If so, I can see about additionally implementing this behavior.

Thanks!
-- 
Richard Alimi
Department of Computer Science
Yale University