
- task spawning speed

  I have been examining things which affect the speed of the pantasks
  processing. I have learned some interesting things:

  * pcontrol was being slammed with requests for status by pantasks.
    this may account for Paul's controller hang-ups.  I have added a
    long (500ms) sleep to the controller thread to limit the rate at
    which controller checks are run

  * adding even a small usleep to the task_thread or job_thread puts
    them to sleep for a long time (>> 10ms).  it seems longer than the
    linux time slicer.  I have removed sleeps from the task and job
    threads.

  * the job submit rate is apparently limited by two things:

    * when the job is submitted (SubmitJob) the interaction with
      the controller seems to take ~30ms or more.

    * some thread (controller thread? main readline thread?) seems to
      introduce timeouts which are very long (up to 100ms).  These
      introduce bit delays if when they happen during the task_thread
      loop. 

- updates for queues:

  -key 1:2:4 (key is string with possibly multiple columns joined)
  string function to drop first word


- todo:

  - create the processing threads:
    - check tasks
    - check jobs
    - check controller  
    - load inputs

- additional issues:
  - server input needs to place files for input on a stack which is 
    actually loaded by the RunScheduler loop
  - have the client run a special multicommand function which passes 
    any unfound commands along to the server.  the server should not 
    be running multicommand, but it probably does not hurt.
    (the client is not allowed to send ';' to the server)

  - pantasks input: this passes an 'input' command to the server, which
    performs the input in a different thread.  is this the same thread
    as the scheduler loop?  another option within the scheduler loop?

