MGD July 01, 2001 swarm-support.


In the common case of one or more step methods that get called
frequently, if you you use at$createFAction instead at$createActionTo
you can improve performance by significantly reducing the overhead of
firing the Action.

In the latest snapshot, there are optimizations to further improvement
the performance of this approach.

Here's a method that creates an FAction for no-argument methods.  You
call it like so:

  schedule.at$createFAction (t, createCall ("step"));

public FCall createCall (String name) {
    try {
        Selector sel = new Selector (getClass (), name, false);
	    
	FArguments fa = new FArgumentsImpl (getZone (), sel);
	    
	return new FCallImpl (getZone (), this, sel, fa);
    } catch (Exception e) {
	e.printStackTrace (System.err);
	System.exit (1);
    }
    return null;
}

The reason createFAction is faster than createActionTo is because the
latter requires Swarm to forward the call and then re-issue it in
Java.  When a FAction is fired for a Java method, it involves only a
function call.  (Then, there are costs inside the Java VM or runtime,
but those can't be avoided.)