I see nothing wrong with the concept of being allocated an initial chunk and having the scan software attempt to ACK it when 50% of it has been searched. A successful ACK would allow the releasing of a new chunk (in You NEVER claim to have searched space until you have actually done so. That is exactly what I was arguing against - but the first sentance of what I quoted was saying was ok.
No -- If you ask for 2 segments, then when you are 50% done, it is OK to ACK the *FIRST* segment.
Assuming that you are multi-threaded--- Simply run two "workers" on the same machine. If there are delays in getting keys assigned, the two will soon get out of phase and keep the cpu busy. I kind of like that idea...
I thought of that, but: 1) for the same server load, it doubles the number of unACKed segments 2) if process A is lagging process B, then when process B finishes and is idle waiting for the server, process A will run faster and thus reduce the lag. This will make the processes drift into phase. I'm not convinced one way or the other.