readme.erb

NAME

  forkoff

SYNOPSIS

  brain-dead simple parallel processing for ruby

URI

  http://rubyforge.org/projects/codeforpeople
  http://github.com/ahoward/forkoff

INSTALL

  gem install forkoff

DESCRIPTION

  forkoff works for any enumerable object, iterating a code block to run in a
  child process and collecting the results.  forkoff can limit the number of
  child processes which is, by default, 2.

SAMPLES

  <%= samples %>

HISTORY
  1.1.0 
    - move to a model with one work queue and signals sent from consumers to
    producer to noitify ready state.  this let's smaller jobs race through a
    single process even while a larger job may have one sub-process bound up.
    incorporates a fix from http://github.com/fredrikj/forkoff which meant
    some processes would lag behind when jobs didn't have similar execution
    times.

  1.0.0
    - move to github

  0.0.4
    - code re-org
    - add :strategy option
    - default number of processes is 2, not 8

  0.0.1

    - updated to use producer threds pushing onto a SizedQueue for each consumer
      channel.  in this way the producers do not build up a massize parllel data
      structure but provide data to the consumers only as fast as they can fork
      and proccess it.  basically for a 4 process run you'll end up with 4
      channels of size 1 between 4 produces and 4 consumers, each consumer is a
      thread popping of jobs, forking, and yielding results.

    - removed use of Queue for capturing the output.  now it's simply an array
      of arrays which removed some sync overhead.

    - you can configure the number of processes globally with

        Forkoff.default['proccess'] = 4

    - you can now pass either an options hash

        forkoff( :processes => 2 ) ...

      or plain vanilla number

        forkoff( 2 ) ...

      to the forkoff call

    - default number of processes is 8, not 2
        

  0.0.0

    initial version