On Mon, Feb 17, 2003 at 08:43:39AM +0900, Matija Kejzar wrote:
> "...if some thread happens to make a call to the
> operating system that takes a long time to complete,
> all threads will hang until the interpreter gets
> control back"
> 
> So, I guess my question is, will a database read or
> write that is handled by a single thread cause all the
> other threads to hang too?

It may depend on the library you are using. I don't know about the mysql
client, but the ruby-oci8 library (for Oracle) lets you configure whether to
use the API in blocking or non-blocking mode, and says that unless you use
non-blocking mode, long queries will block other threads.

Regards,

Brian.