is there a blocking queue in Java that only allows peek? - java

I need a blocking queue that has a size of 1, and every time put is applied it removes the last value and adds the next one. The consumers would be a thread pool in which each thread needs to read the message as it gets put on the queue and decide what to do with it, but they shouldn't be able to take from the queue since all of them need to read from it.
I was considering just taking and putting every time the producer sends out a new message, but having only peek in the run method of the consumers will result in them constantly peeking, won't it? Ideally the message will disappear as soon as the peeking stops, but I don't want to use a timed poll as it's not guaranteed that every consumer will peek the message in time.
My other option at the moment is to iterate over the collection of consumers and call a public method on them with the message, but I really don't want to do that since the system relies on real time updates, and a large collection will take a while to iterate through completely if I'm going through each method call on the stack.

After some consideration, I think you're best off, with each consumer having its own queue and the producer putting its messages on all queues.
If there are few consumers, then putting the messages on those few queues will not take too long (except when the producer blocks because a consumer can't keep up).
If there are many consumers this situation will be highly preferable over a situation where many consumers are in contention with each other.
At the very least this would be a good measure to compare alternate solutions against.

Related

How to reconsume a rejected message later, RabbitMQ

Sometimes due to some external problems, I need to requeue a message by basic.reject with requeue = true.
But I don't need to consume it immediately because it will possibly fail again in a short time. If I continuously requeue it, this may result in infinite loop and requeue.
So I need to consume it later, say one minute later,
And I need to know how many times the messages has been requeue so that I can stop requeue it but only reject it to declare it fails to consume.
PS: I am using Java client.
There are multiple solutions to point 1.
First one is the one chosen by Celery (a Python producer/consumer library that can use RabbitMQ as broker). Inside your message, add a timestamp at which the task should be executed. When your consumer gets the message, do not ack it and check its timestamp. As soon as the timestamp is reached, the worker can execute the task. (Note that the worker can continue working on other tasks instead of waiting)
This technique has some drawbacks. You have to increase the QoS per channel to an arbitrary value. And if your worker is already working on a long running task, the delayed task wont be executed until the first task has finished.
A second technique is RabbitMQ-only and is much more elegant. It takes advantage of dead-letter exchanges and Messages TTL. You create a new queue which isn't consumed by anybody. This queue has a dead-letter exchange that will forward the messages to the consumer queue. When you want to defer a message, ack it (or reject it without requeue) from the consumer queue and copy the message into the dead-lettered queue with a TTL equal to the delay you want (say one minute later). At (roughly) the end of TTL, the defered message will magically land in the consumer queue again, ready to be consumed. RabbitMQ team has also made the Delayed Message Plugin (this plugin is marked as experimental yet fairly stable and potential suitable for production use as long as the user is aware of its limitations and has serious limitations in term of scalability and reliability in case of failover, so you might decide whether you really want to use it in production, or if you prefer to stick to the manual way, limited to one TTL per queue).
Point 2. just requires putting a counter in your message and handling this inside your app. You can choose to put this counter in a header or directly in the body.

Android: blocking or non-blocking queue for continuous SQL inserts?

I have an app where upon pressing a Start button, a service will begin that polls a few sensors, stores the sensor data into some object whenever the sensor values change. Every 10ms, a database insert occurs that takes the objects current values and stores them into the database. This happens for 30 minutes
Given the speed and duration of insertion, I want to run this in a separate thread from the UI thread so navigation doesn't take a hit. So my service will offer some data to the thread by adding it to a queue, then the other thread (consumer) will take from the queue and insert into the database
When the Stop button is pressed, I need to make sure to process the rest of the queue before killing off the thread.
It seems that everywhere I look, some sort of blocking queue is recommended for producer/consumer type situations (e.g. LinkedBlockingQueue vs ConcurrentLinkedQueue, or What's the different between LinkedBlockingQueue and ConcurrentLinkedQueue?)
My question is, does a blocking queue make sense in my situation?
The most vital thing in this app is that all data gets inserted into the db. From what I understand (please correct me if I'm wrong), but if the queue becomes full, and the consumer thread can't do inserts quickly enough to free up more queue space, then the producer is blocked from adding things to the queue? If that's right then by the time queue the has free space, a few sensor readings would have gone by and they would not be inserted into the db due to the blocking
At the end of the day, I just need the best way to ensure that data gets inserted every 10ms without skipping a beat. In my mind it makes sense to dump the values into some unbounded, limitless queue every 10ms, and have the consumer poll it as soon as it's able. Then when Stop is pressed, drain the rest of the queue before killing the thread.
So what is the correct way to handle this in a 1 producer/1 consumer situations?
If I were you, I would use a single thread executor for this task - it already comes with the exact functionality that you need out of the box. More info here.

Server accessing two different type of threads

I have a msgs server with 2 different type of threads, one that reads from the client, and the other writes in another client (depending on the receiver)... (and yes, it has to be that way, I cant have the read/write in the same thread...)
I basically need to store somewhere in an ArrayList(Server ?) with all msgs, holding them up until the other client connects to the server.
My problem is:
I can easily read the object from the Thread, however i can't see any way to extract the object to a shared ArrayList in order to get acess to him in the other thread.
--->Input Thread ---> ArrayList ---> OutputThread
It sounds like what you really need is a thread-safe queue, not necessarily an ArrayList. The BlockingQueue interface is meant specifically for this sort of thing. Your input thread can put messages into the queue, and the output thread can remove them. If the queue is empty when the output thread tries to take a message from it, it'll automatically wait for the input thread to add a message.
There are a number of classes that implement the BlockingQueue interface, but you'll probably want to use one of these two:
ArrayBlockingQueue is based on a fixed-size array, so you have to choose a size when you construct one, and that's the limit for how many items can be held in the queue. If the queue is full when the input thread tries to put a message into it, the input thread will wait for the output thread to remove one of the messages already in the queue.
LinkedBlockingQueue doesn't require a size limit; you can have a queue that never gets "full", so the input thread can keep putting more and more messages into it even if the output thread isn't removing them fast enough to keep up. (Queueing up too many messages can eventually lead to an OutOfMemoryError.)

How to create Java concurrent queue from which we can blocking-take more than 1 element in single call?

Background: I need to send many small-size messages to WebSocket clients in asynchronous way. Messages are usually sent in peak, so after some pause I need to send ~5000 messages fast. So the problem is:
I don't want to start 5000 async's in single thread
I don't want to loop "start async"-"wait for complete" 5000 times in serial
I don't want to use 5000 threads, with single "start async"-"wait for complete" per thread
The best way would be to group ~20 asyncs per thread, so I need very specific queue:
lot of means concurrent push/poll in queue
small-sized asynchronous means I want to poll in bundles, like 1 to 20 messages per queue take() (so I can start 1...20 async I/O and wait for completness in single thread)
immediately means that I dont want to wait until 20 messages will be polled, bundle-poll should be used only if queue has lot of messages. Single message should be polled and sent immediately.
So basically: I need structure like queue that has blocking take(1 to X) waiting elements in single blocking call. Pseudocode:
[each of ~50 processing threads]:
messages = queue.blockingTake( max 10 or at least 1 if less than 10 available );
for each message: message.startAsync()
for each message: message.waitToComplete()
repeat
I wouldn't implement a Queue from scratch if it's not really necessary. A few ideas if you're interested:
Queue> if you have only 1 thread doing the offers. If you have more, the collection has to be sync'd. Like, one offerer peek()-s into the queue, sees that the last collection has too many elements so it creates a new one and offers it.
or
A number of running threads where the runnables take elements one by one from the queue.
or
1 queue per sending thread, if you keep the queue references you can then add elements to each of them in a round robin fashion.
or
subclass a BlockingQueue of your choice and create a "Collection take(int i)" method with a rewritten version of the normal take().

lmax disruptor is too slow in multi-producer mode compared to single-producer mode

Previously, when I use single-producer mode of disruptor, e.g.
new Disruptor<ValueEvent>(ValueEvent.EVENT_FACTORY,
2048, moranContext.getThreadPoolExecutor(), ProducerType.Single,
new BlockingWaitStrategy())
the performance is good. Now I am in a situation that multiple threads would write to a single ring buffer. What I found is that ProducerType.Multi make the code several times slower than single producer mode. That poor performance is not going to be accepted by me. So should I use single producer mode while multiple threads invoke the same event publish method with locks, is that OK? Thanks.
I'm somewhat new to the Disruptor, but after extensive testing and experimenting, I can say that ProducerType.MULTI is more accurate and faster for 2 or more producer threads.
With 14 producer threads on a MacBook, ProducerType.SINGLE shows more events published than consumed, even though my test code is waiting for all producers to end (which they do after a 10s run), and then waiting for the disruptor to end. Not very accurate: Where do those additional published events go?
Driver start: PID=38619 Processors=8 RingBufferSize=1024 Connections=Reuse Publishers=14[SINGLE] Handlers=1[BLOCK] HandlerType=EventHandler<Event>
Done: elpased=10s eventsPublished=6956894 eventsProcessed=4954645
Stats: events/sec=494883.36 sec/event=0.0000 CPU=82.4%
Using ProducerType.MULTI, fewer events are published than with SINGLE, but more events are actually consumed in the same 10 seconds than with SINGLE. And with MULTI, all of the published events are consumed, just what I would expect due to the careful way the driver shuts itself down after the elapsed time expires:
Driver start: PID=38625 Processors=8 RingBufferSize=1024 Connections=Reuse Publishers=14[MULTI] Handlers=1[BLOCK] HandlerType=EventHandler<Event>
Done: elpased=10s eventsPublished=6397109 eventsProcessed=6397109
Stats: events/sec=638906.33 sec/event=0.0000 CPU=30.1%
Again: 2 or more producers: Use ProducerType.MULTI.
By the way, each Producer publishes directly to the ring buffer by getting the next slot, updating the event, and then publishing the slot. And the handler gets the event whenever its onEvent method is called. No extra queues. Very simple.
IMHO, single producer accessed by multi threads with lock won't resolve your problem, because it simply shift the locking from the disruptor side to your own program.
The solution to your problem varies from the type of event model you need. I.e. do you need the events to be consumed chronologically; merged; or any special requirement. Since you are dealing with disruptor and multi producers, that sounds to me very much like FX trading systems :-) Anyway, based on my experience, assuming you need chronological order per producer but don't care about mixing events between producers, I would recommend you to do a queue merging thread. The structure is
Each producer produces data and put them into its own named queue
A worker thread constantly examine the queues. For each queue it remove one or several items and put it to the single producer of your single producer disruptor.
Note that in the above scenario,
Each producer queue is a single producer single consumer queue.
The disruptor is a single producer multi consumer disruptor.
Depends on your need, to avoid a forever running thread, if the thread examine for, say, 100 runs and all queues are empty, it can set some variable and go wait() and the event producers can yield() it when seeing it's waiting.
I think this resolve your problem. If not please post your need of event processing pattern and let's see.

Categories

Resources