A command-line power tool for Twitter • Hacker News Board

Re: A command-line power tool for Twitter

#11

Post by gcr » Sat, May 03, 2014, 4:02 PM UTC

ajanuary wrote: post #6

aeroevan wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Thread pools are great for doing bulk operations... long API requests is a great thing to do in parallel when possible.

There's a runtime overhead of spinning up a bunch of threads that are just going to sit idle waiting for an API response. There are better asynchronous models for that sort of thing.

Even if starting a new thread takes 1ms, that pales in comparison to the 300ms network connection.

On my laptop, thread creation (pthread_create() followed by pthread_detach() takes ~17 microseconds.

When one end of a socket is on the Internet somewhere, connection time is ~80ms. If I start a thread and then have it create a network connection, eliminating the therad spawn overhead couldn't save more than 0.02% (that's two percent of a percent) of the running time, by Amdahl's law.

The effect of thread creation just isn't significant here. If this utility is going to spawn 1,000 simultaneous API connections to twitter, the threads could all be started by the time the first connection succeeds.

(My numbers come from a class assignment where I benchmarked some unrelated stuff, but if you're interested, I can send you the report)

Re: A command-line power tool for Twitter

#12

Post by sedev » Sat, May 03, 2014, 5:00 PM UTC

chippy wrote: post #9

I think the king of command line clients is TTYtter - I love it. http://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/

To my great sadness, TTYtter is currently unmaintained (I sent in a bug report and that's what the dude told me). So I expect it to stop working at some point. Until then, best desktop Twitter client for me by a mile.

I wish Twitter, Inc weren't the absolutely stinking worst maker of Twitter clients. :(

Re: A command-line power tool for Twitter

#13

Post by sc68cal » Sat, May 03, 2014, 5:14 PM UTC

Foxboron wrote: post #7

spindritf wrote: post #3

This has many cool features and is easy to use in scripts but if you just want Twitter in your terminal, check out Twirssi[1]. It plugs into irssi which many have running already anyway. [1] http://twirssi.com/

Using bitlbee for this is awesome aswell. Then you don't need to run several scripts for more functionality (g+, Facebook, jabber etc)

The problem with Bitlbee is that it does not support twitter lists. I had a project to add that support, but my C is very rusty :(

Re: A command-line power tool for Twitter

#14

Post by mitchellh » Sat, May 03, 2014, 6:41 PM UTC

mantrax5 wrote: post #2

"Multi-threaded: Whenever possible, Twitter API requests are made in parallel, resulting in faster performance for bulk operations." That's not what threads are about.

t is written in Ruby, and Ruby doesn't come standard with a non-blocking HTTP client. You'd have to pull in EventMachine which would have a far greater cost than spinning up a thread. Additionally, threads in Ruby are user-level threads, so the overhead is a lot smaller than a kernel thread.

I see what you're saying here, but given that t had little other choice, I don't see how this comment adds any value other than to attempt to point out anything that could possibly be wrong with t.

Instead, I think t is fantastic. The usage of threads is good enough, and I thank Erik for spending so much time on a sweet little utility.