How to build a monitor with infinite loop? - performance

Question

I am building a monitor in Kotlin to schedule certain operations, what I want is a program that inserts or updates some database entries for a given time intervall. What I got so far is a program that runs for a given time span, but I have an infinite loop in my porgram that takes up to 30% of processor power when it is not time for an update. So my question is how to build a monitor without an infinite loop?
this my code so far:
while(!operations.done && appConfigurations.run_with_monitor) {
if (DataSourceMonitor.isReadyForUpdate(lastMonitorModel)) {
operations.update()
}
}
operations is an entire sequence of different actions to execute. Each operation implementing the IScheduler interface.
interface IScheduler {
var done: Boolean
fun update()
fun reset()
}
Example of implementation:
class Repeat(private val task: IScheduler) : IScheduler {
override var done = false
override fun update() {
if (this.task.done) {
this.reset()
}
this.task.update()
//logger.info { "Update repeat, done is always $done" }
}
override fun reset() {
this.task.reset()
this.done = false
}
}
class Sequence(private val task1: IScheduler, private val task2: IScheduler): IScheduler {
override var done = false
var current = task1
var next = task2
override fun update() {
if (!this.done) {
this.current.update()
if (this.current.done) {
this.current = this.next
}
if (this.next.done) {
this.done = true
}
}
}
class Print(private val msg: String): IScheduler {
override var done = false
override fun update() {
println(this.msg)
this.done = true
}
override fun reset() {
this.done = false
}
}
The value of operations can be as follows:
val operations = Repeat(Sequence(Print("First action"), Print("Another action")))
**So right now my monitor is working and completely functional, but how can I improve the performance of the infinite loop? **
Hope anyone has some ideas about this.

Answer 1

If your DataSourceMonitor has no way to block until isReadyForUpdate is going to return true, then the usual approach is to add a delay. eg:
while(!operations.done && appConfigurations.run_with_monitor) {
if (DataSourceMonitor.isReadyForUpdate(lastMonitorModel)) {
operations.update()
} else {
Thread.sleep(POLL_DELAY);
}
}
If it's always ready for update there won't be any delay, but if it ever isn't ready for update then it'll sleep. You'll need to tune the POLL_DELAY. Bigger values mean less CPU usage, but greater latency in detecting new events to process. Smaller values produce less latency, but use more CPU.
If you really want to get fancy you can have the poll delay start small and then increase up to some maximum, dropping back down once events are found. This is probably overkill, but look up "adaptive polling" if you're interested.

Answer 2

I have refactored my code and I can accomplish the same result with less code, by removing the IScheduler interface by the abstract class TimerTask. The job can be done with these lines of code:
val scheduler = Sequence(
Print("Executed task 1"),
Sequence(Print("Executed task 2"),
Sequence(Print("Executed task 3"), Print("Finished Scheduler")))
)
Timer().schedule(scheduler, DELAY, PERIOD)
All the interface implementations are changed to TimerTask implementations:
class Print(private val msg: String): TimerTask() {
override fun run() {
println(msg)
}
}
class Sequence(private val task1: Runnable, private val task2: Runnable): TimerTask() {
override fun run() {
task1.run()
task2.run()
}
}