[gst-devel] autoplugging and 0.9

[Andy Wingo]

On Mon, 16 Aug 2004, Benjamin Otte wrote:

> Which brings me to another thing we recently discussed on IRC:
> If we make threading implicit and allow the schedulers to insert new
> threads (which obviously need queues), how do we guarantee or at least
> achieve low latency?

I could be off my rocker, but I don't think multiple threads and low
latency are achievable together. Multiple threads within the flow of
data of course; other threads that are truly independent don't affect
the latency.

The reason is that locking a mutex, necessary for sharing data between
threads, is not a bounded-time operation.

That's not to say that latency will be uniformly poor, or that
performance will bad. It's just that you stand a good chance of getting
a latency spike every now and then, possibly causing dropouts.

Wingo.