Ruby concurrency explainined | Matt Aimonetti

Decent article: "Ruby concurrency explained"

Earlier we talked a bit about the actor model . Since Ruby 1.9, developers now have access to a new type of “lightweight” threads called Fibers . Fibers are not actors and Ruby doesn’t have a native Actor model implementation but some people wrote some actor libs on top of fibers. A fiber is like a simplified thread which isn’t scheduled by the VM but by the programmer. Fibers are like blocks which can be paused and resumed from the outside of from within themselves. Fibers are faster and use less memory than threads as demonstrated in this blog post . However, because of the GIL, you still cannot truly run more than one concurrent fiber by thread and if you want to use multiple CPU cores, you will need to run fibers within more than one thread. So how do fibers help with concurrency? The answer is that they are part of a bigger solution. Fiber allow developers to manually...

Full article: http://merbist.com/2011/02/22/concurrency-in-ruby-explained/