The following simple Promise is vowed and I am not allowed to break it.
my $my_promise = start {
loop {} # or sleep x;
'promise response'
}
say 'status : ', $my_promise.status; # status : Planned
$my_promise.break('promise broke'); # Access denied to keep/break this Promise; already vowed
# in block <unit> at xxx line xxx
Why is that?
Because the Promise is vowed, you cannot change it: only something that actually has the vow, can break the Promise. That is the intent of the vow functionality.
What are you trying to achieve by breaking the promise as you showed? Is it to stop the work being done inside of the start block? Breaking the Promise would not do that. And the vow mechanism was explicitly added to prevent you from thinking it can somehow stop the work inside a start block.
If you want work inside a start block to be interruptible, you will need to add some kind of semaphore that is regularly checked, for instance:
my int $running = 1;
my $my_promise = start {
while $running {
# do stuff
}
$running
}
# do other stuff
$running = 0;
await $my_promise;
Hope this made sense.
The reason why you cannot directly keep/break Promise from outside or stop it on Thread Pool are explained here in Jonathans comment.
Common misuse of Promises comes from timeout pattern.
await Promise.anyof(
start { sleep 4; say "finished"; },
Promise.in( 1 )
);
say "moving on...";
sleep;
This will print "finished". And when user realize that the next logical step for him is to try to kill obsolete Promise. While the only correct way to solve it is to make Promise aware that its work is no longer needed. For example through periodically checking some shared variable.
Things gets complicated if you have blocking code on Promise (for example database query) that runs for too long and you want to terminate it from main thread. That is not doable on Promises. All you can do is to ensure Promise will run in finite time (for example on MySQL by setting MAX_EXECUTION_TIME before running query). And then you have choice:
You can grind your teeth and patiently wait for Promise to finish. For example if you really must disconnect database in main thread.
Or you can move on immediately and allow "abandoned" Promise to finish on its own, without ever receiving its result. In this case you should control how many of those Promises can stack up in background by using Semaphore or running them on dedicated ThreadPoolScheduler.
So, I have a list of tasks which I want to schedule concurrently in a non-blocking fashion.
Basically, gather should do the trick.
Like
tasks = [ asyncio.create_task(some_task()) in bleh]
results = await asyncio.gather(*tasks)
But then, I also need a timeout. What I want is that any task which takes > timeout time cancels and I proceed with what I have.
I fould asyncio.wait primitive.
https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio-task.html#waiting-primitives
But then the doc says:
Run awaitable objects in the aws set concurrently and block until the condition specified by return_when.
Which seems to suggest that it blocks...
It seems that asyncio.wait_for will do the trick
https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio-task.html#timeouts
But how do i send in the list of awaitables rather than just an awaitable?
What I want is that any task which takes > timeout time cancels and I proceed with what I have.
This is straightforward to achieve with asyncio.wait():
# Wait for tasks to finish, but no more than a second.
done, pending = await asyncio.wait(tasks, timeout=1)
# Cancel the ones not done by now.
for fut in pending:
fut.cancel()
# Results are available as x.result() on futures in `done`
Which seems to suggest that [asyncio.wait] blocks...
It only blocks the current coroutine, the same as gather or wait_for.
I'm making a Ruby server using the em-websocket gem. When a client sends some message (e.g. "thread") the server creates two different threads and sends two anwsers to the client in parallel (I'm actually studying multithreading and websockets). Here's my code:
EM.run {
EM::WebSocket.run(:host => "0.0.0.0", :port => 8080) do |ws|
ws.onmessage { |msg|
puts "Recieved message: #{msg}"
if msg == "thread"
threads = []
threads << a = Thread.new {
sleep(1)
puts "1"
ws.send("Message sent from thread 1")
}
threads << b = Thread.new{
sleep(2)
puts "2"
ws.send("Message sent from thread 2")
}
threads.each { |aThread| aThread.join }
end
How it executes:
I'm sending "thread" message to a server
After one second in my console I see printed string "1". After another second I see "2".
Only after that both messages simultaneously are sent to the client.
The problem is that I want to send messages exactly at the same time when debug output "1" and "2" are sent.
My Ruby version is 1.9.3p194.
I don't have experience with EM, so take this with a pinch of salt.
However, at first glance, it looks like "aThread.join" is actually blocking the "onmessage" method from completing and thus also preventing the "ws.send" from being processed.
Have you tried removing the "threads.each" block?
Edit:
After having tested this in arch linux with both ruby 1.9.3 and 2.0.0 (using "test.html" from the examples of em-websocket), I am sure that even if removing the "threads.each" block doesn't fix the problem for you, you will still have to remove it as Thread#join will suspend the current thread until the "joined" threads are finished.
If you follow the function call of "ws.onmessage" through the source code, you will end up at the Connection#send_data method of the Eventmachine module and find the following within the comments:
Call this method to send data to the remote end of the network connection. It takes a single String argument, which may contain binary data. Data is buffered to be sent at the end of this event loop tick (cycle).
As "onmessage" is blocked by the "join" until both "send" methods have run, the event loop tick cannot finish until both sets of data are buffered and thus, all the data cannot be sent until this time.
If it is still not working for you after removing the "threads.each" block, make sure that you have restarted your eventmachine and try setting the second sleep to 5 seconds instead. I don't know how long a typical event loop takes in eventmachine (and I can't imagine it to be as long as a second), however, the documentation basically says that if several "send" calls are made within the same tick, they will all be sent at the same time. So increasing the time difference will make sure that this is not happening.
I think the problem is that you are calling sleep method, passing 1 to the first thread and 2 to the second thread.
Try removing sleep call on both threads or passing the same value on each call.
So lets say I have a sidekiq process that sends off a http post request that I don't want to wait for. I don't want this to be a blocker on the speed of the workers.
One idea I have is to use this simple sample code for EventMachine Http Request
EventMachine.run do
http = EventMachine::HttpRequest.new("http://www.example.com").post :options => {...}
http.callback do
puts "got a response"
puts http.response
EventMachine.stop
end
puts "worker finished"
end
so lets assume my worker process finishes before the callback is called. What will happen here? does this mean the pointer to the call back will fail? I'd like to understand the flow of control here.
Depending on what you need:
You want to utilize CPU
Sidekiq workers are very lightweight. You can run more of them to utilize CPU while waiting responce.
You want workers to finish faster.
You can enqueue each request to be proccessed by different worker. It will be like next_tick() in EM.
I'm excited about Sidekiq and Celluloid because it changes the way we think. http://www.slideshare.net/KyleDrake/hybrid-concurrency-patterns?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email
The EventMachine.run block will not return until you call EventMachine.stop. So, on your case, the worker won't finish without the callback being run.
I'm working in a service whose main loop looks like this:
while (fServer.ServerState = ssStarted) and (Self.Terminated = false) do
begin
Self.ServiceThread.ProcessRequests(false);
ProcessFiles;
Sleep(3000);
end;
ProcessRequests is a lot like Application.ProcessMessages. I can't pass true to it because if I do then it blocks until a message is received from Windows, and ProcessFiles won't run, and it has to run continually. The Sleep is there to keep the CPU usage down.
This works just fine until I try to shut down the service from Windows's service management list. When I hit Stop, it sends a message and expects to get a response almost immediately, and if it's in the middle of that Sleep command, Windows will give me an error that the service didn't respond to the Stop command.
So what I need is to say "Sleep for 3000 or until you receive a message, whichever comes first." I'm sure there's an API for that, but I'm not sure what it is. Does anyone know?
This kind of stuff is hard to get right, so I usually start at the API documentation at MSDN.
The WaitForSingleObject documention specifically directs to MsgWaitForMultipleObjects for these kinds of situations:
Use caution when calling the wait
functions and code that directly or
indirectly creates windows. If a
thread creates any windows, it must
process messages. Message broadcasts
are sent to all windows in the system.
A thread that uses a wait function
with no time-out interval may cause
the system to become deadlocked. Two
examples of code that indirectly
creates windows are DDE and the
CoInitialize function. Therefore, if
you have a thread that creates
windows, use MsgWaitForMultipleObjects
or MsgWaitForMultipleObjectsEx, rather
than WaitForSingleObject.
In MsgWaitForMultipleObjects, you have a dwWakeMask parameter specifying on which queued messages to return, and a table describing the masks you can use.
Edit because of comment by Warren P:
If your main loop can be continued because of a ReadFileEx, WriteFileEx or QueueUserAPC, then you can use SleepEx.
--jeroen
MsgWaitForMultipleObjects() is the way to go, ie:
while (fServer.ServerState = ssStarted) and (not Self.Terminated) do
begin
ProcessFiles;
if MsgWaitForMultipleObjects(0, nil, FALSE, 3000, QS_ALLINPUT) = WAIT_OBJECT_0 then
Self.ServiceThread.ProcessRequests(false);
end;
If you want to call ProcessFiles() at 3 second intervals regardless of any messages arriving, then you can use a waitable timer for that, ie:
var
iDue: TLargeInteger;
hTimer: array[0..0] of THandle;
begin
iDue := -30000000; // 3 second relative interval, specified in nanoseconds
hTimer[0] := CreateWaitableTimer(nil, False, nil);
SetWaitableTimer(hTimer[0], iDue, 0, nil, nil, False);
while (fServer.ServerState = ssStarted) and (not Self.Terminated) do
begin
// using a timeout interval so the loop conditions can still be checked periodically
case MsgWaitForMultipleObjects(1, hTimer, False, 1000, QS_ALLINPUT) of
WAIT_OBJECT_0:
begin
ProcessFiles;
SetWaitableTimer(hTimer[0], iDue, 0, nil, nil, False);
end;
WAIT_OBJECT_0+1: Self.ServiceThread.ProcessRequests(false);
end;
end;
CancelWaitableTimer(hTimer[0]);
CloseHandle(hTimer[0]);
end;
Use a timer to run ProcessFiles instead of hacking it into main application loop. Then ProcessFiles will run in the interval you want and the messages will be processed correctly, not taking 100 % CPU.
I used a TTimer in a multithreaded application with strange results, so now i use Events.
while (fServer.ServerState = ssStarted) and (Self.Terminated = false) do
begin
Self.ServiceThread.ProcessRequests(false);
ProcessFiles;
if ExitEvent.WaitFor(3000) <> wrTimeout then
Exit;
end;
You create the event with
ExitEvent := TEvent.Create(nil, False, False, '');
Now the last thing is to fire the event in case of service stop. I think the Stop event of the service is the right place to put this.
ExitEvent.SetEvent;
I use this code for an cleanup thread in my DB connections pooling system, but it should work well in your case too.
You don't need to sleep for 3 full seconds to keep the CPU usage low. Even something like Sleep(500) should keep your usage pretty low (if there are no messages waiting to process it should blow through the loop pretty quick and hit the sleep again. If your loop takes a few ms to run it still means your thread is spending the vast majority of time in sleep.
That being said, your code may benefit from some refactoring. You say you don't want ProcessRequests to block waiting for a message? The only other thing in that loop is ProcessFiles. If that is dependent on the message being processed then why can't it block? And if it's not dependent on the message being processed then can it be split onto another thread? (the previous suggestion of firing ProcessFiles via a timer is an excellent suggestion on how to do this).
Use an TEvent that you signal when the thread should wake up. Then block on the tevent (using waitformultiple as Jeroen says if you have multiple events to wait on)
Is it not possible to move ProcessFiles to a seperate thread? In your MainThread you just wait for messages and when the service is being terminated you terminate the ProcessFiles thread.