One limitation of SIGSTOP is that the last time I instrumented it in
detail, which admittedly was several years ago, every process you send
the message to has to run long enough to receive the message.
We were in the the position of sending it to fairly large groups of
processes, partly through laziness in code structure, but when I looked
at the time lines I was appalled to see a large number of context
switches for *very* short execution intervals. All were associated with
receiving the SIGSTOP and SIGCONT.
I found a rather painful humor in the fact that we were running
processes in order to keep them from running.
So, a way to change state of a process that does not cost a context
switch has some appeal.
Doug
On 04/26/2010 01:29 PM, Joerg Roedel wrote: