Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!rcbc
From: rcbc@honir.cs.cornell.edu (Robert Cooper)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.isis
Subject: Re: Is there a limit...to the number of tasks in ISIS?
Message-ID: <34156@cornell.UUCP>
Date: 12 Nov 89 23:12:11 GMT
Sender: nobody@cornell.UUCP
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept. Ithaca NY
Lines: 18

There is no intrinsic limit to the number of simultaneous lightweight tasks
in an ISIS program. However you will eventually run out of virtual memory.

Each task is allocated a new stack which is usually 32Kbytes by default,
and you can change this using t_set_stacksize.  Also, ISIS tasks are
implemented using whatever threads package is available on the
machine/operating system you are running on, and this threads mechanism may
impose some limit of its own. Some thread mechanisms have variable stack
sizes---you only use as much as you need---while others provide no way to
change the default stack size.

So exactly how many ISIS tasks you can create depends on the system
you are running. You are best to experimentally determine how many
tasks you can create before some resource is exhausted.
In practice we use many tens of tasks in our programs, but probably not
hundreds. 

                                 -- Robert Cooper