Is there a way to call a block every microsecond using celluloid? - ruby

I'm using celluloid's every method to execute a block every microsecond however it seems to always call the block every second even when I specify a decimal.
interval = 1.0 / 2.0
every interval do
puts "*"*80
puts "Time: #{Time.now}"
puts "*"*80
end
I would expect this to be called every 0.5 seconds. But it is called every one second.
Any suggestions?

You can get fractional second resolution with Celluloid.
Celluloid uses the Timers gem to manage the every, which does good floating point time math and ruby's sleep which has reasonable sub-second resolution.
The following code works perfectly:
class Bob
include Celluloid
def fred
every 0.5 do
puts Time.now.strftime "%M:%S.%N"
end
end
end
Bob.new.fred
And it produces the following output:
22:51.299923000
22:51.801311000
22:52.302229000
22:52.803512000
22:53.304800000
22:53.805759000
22:54.307003000
22:54.808279000
22:55.309358000
22:55.810017000
As you can see, it is not perfect, but close enough for most purposes.
If you are seeing different results, it is likely because of how long your code takes in the block you have given to every or other timers running and starving that particular one. I would approach it by simplifying the situation as much as possible and slowly adding parts back in to determine where the slowdown is occurring.
As for microsecond resolution, I don't think you can hope to get that far down reliably with any non-trivial code.
The trivial example:
def bob
puts Time.now.strftime "%M:%S.%N"
sleep 1.0e-6
puts Time.now.strftime "%M:%S.%N"
end
Produces:
31:07.373858000
31:07.373936000
31:08.430110000
31:08.430183000
31:09.062000000
31:09.062079000
31:09.638078000
31:09.638156000
So as you can see, even just a base ruby version on my machine running nothing but a simple IO line doesn't reliably give me microsecond speeds.

Related

Executing command after time has passed

I want to know how to execute a function after a certain amount of time has passed. The user will enter a duration, say 30 minutes, and after 30 minutes they will be given a message, along with other code being done. I am new to Ruby, and can't figure out the best way to do it.
If you don't want to block IO you can use threads:
time = gets.to_i # time in seconds
Thread.new do
sleep time
# your code here
end
Or just:
time = gets.to_i # time in seconds
sleep time
# your code here
You could look into gems like DelayedJob or Resque.

How do I figure out where my script is sleeping?

One of my unit tests is extremely slow, taking more than a full second for each test. Profiling that test file, the top few lines read:
% cumulative self self total
time seconds seconds calls ms/call ms/call name
198.71 12.28 12.28 2 6140.00 6140.00 Mutex#sleep
14.40 13.17 0.89 9658 0.09 1.09 REXML::Element#namespace
10.68 13.83 0.66 18814 0.04 0.08 REXML::Element#root
I can't figure out where the sleep call comes from though! My whole application only sleeps in one place, in a class called Throttle, and I've inserted a breakpoint in front of it which doesn't trigger during this test. I have tried:
class Mutex
def sleep(time)
require "byebug"; byebug
end
end
Which never breaks, and I've tried:
def setup
Mutex.define_singleton_method(:sleep) { |time|
require "byebug"; byebug
}
end
Which also does absolutely nothing. I have also tried both of these with Kernel instead of Mutex. I have read through my code countless times and I can't for the life of me figure out why my application is constantly sleeping! Can anybody give me any pointers?
I figured it out. Turns out Mutex#sleep was invoked by Net::HTTP#post. My unit test bootstrap script was supposed to override all functions that writes to disk or makes network requests, but I had forgotten to require the functions that I was supposed to override, so the end result was that my overrides were overwritten by the actual functions, causing my unit tests to make real requests to online APIs.
I only discovered this by chance as I was stepping through the code in byebug.
As soon as I fixed the bootstrap script, my unit tests ran as quickly as ever.

Howto know that I do not block Ruby eventmachine with a mongodb operation

I am working on a eventmachine based application that periodically polls for changes of MongoDB stored documents.
A simplified code snippet could look like:
require 'rubygems'
require 'eventmachine'
require 'em-mongo'
require 'bson'
EM.run {
#db = EM::Mongo::Connection.new('localhost').db('foo_development')
#posts = #db.collection('posts')
#comments = #db.collection('comments')
def handle_changed_posts
EM.next_tick do
cursor = #posts.find(state: 'changed')
resp = cursor.defer_as_a
resp.callback do |documents|
handle_comments documents.map{|h| h["comment_id"]}.map(&:to_s) unless documents.length == 0
end
resp.errback do |err|
raise *err
end
end
end
def handle_comments comment_ids
meta_product_ids.each do |id|
cursor = #comments.find({_id: BSON::ObjectId(id)})
resp = cursor.defer_as_a
resp.callback do |documents|
magic_value = documents.first['weight'].to_i * documents.first['importance'].to_i
end
resp.errback do |err|
raise *err
end
end
end
EM.add_periodic_timer(1) do
puts "alive: #{Time.now.to_i}"
end
EM.add_periodic_timer(5) do
handle_changed_posts
end
}
So every 5 seconds EM iterates over all posts, and selects the changed ones. For each changed post it stores the comment_id in an array. When done that array is passed to a handle_comments which loads every comment and does some calculation.
Now I have some difficulties in understanding:
I know, that this load_posts->load_comments->calculate cycle takes 3 seconds in a Rails console with 20000 posts, so it will not be much faster in EM. I schedule the handle_changed_posts method every 5 seconds which is fine unless the number of posts raises and the calculation takes longer than the 5 seconds after which the same run is scheduled again. In that case I'd have a problem soon. How to avoid that?
I trust em-mongo but I do not trust my EM knowledge. To monitor EM is still running I puts a timestamp every second. This seems to be working fine but gets a bit bumpy every 5 seconds when my calculation runs. Is that a sign, that I block the loop?
Is there any general way to find out if I block the loop?
Should I nice my eventmachine process with -19 to give it top OS prio always?
I have been reluctant to answer here since I've got no mongo experience so far, but considering no one is answering and some of the stuff here is general EM stuff I may be able to help:
schedule next scan on first scan's end (resp.callback and resp.errback in handle_changed_posts seem like good candidates to chain next scan), either with add_timer or with next_tick
probably, try handling your mongo trips more often so they handle smaller chunks of data, any cpu cycle hog inside your reactor would make your reactor loop too busy to accept events such as periodic timer ticks
no simple way, no. One idea would be to measure diff of Time.now to next_tick{Time.now}, do benchmark and then trace possible culprits when the diff crosses a threshold. Simulating slow queries (Simulate slow query in mongodb? ?) and many parallel connections is a good idea
I honestly don't know, I've never encountered people who do that, I expect it depends on other things running on that server
To expand upon bbozo's answer, specifically in relation to your second question, there is no time when you run code that you do not block the loop. In my experience, when we talk about 'non-blocking' code what we really mean is 'code that doesn't block very long'. Typically, these are very short periods of time (less than a millisecond), but they still block while executing.
Further, the only thing next_tick really does is to say 'do this, but not right now'. What you really want to do, as bbozo mentioned, is split up your processing over multiple ticks such that each iteration blocks for as little time as possible.
To use your own benchmarks, if 20,000 records takes about 3 seconds to process, 4,000 records should take about 0.6 seconds. This would be short enough to not usually affect your 1 second heartbeat. You could split it up even farther to reduce the amount of blockage and make the reactor run smoother, but it really depends on how much concurrency you need from the reactor.

Getting Thread not to run until join in ruby

I am getting into ruby and have been using threads for a little while now with out fully understanding them. I notice that when adding a thread to an array and if I add a sleep() command as the first command the thread does not run until I do a join which is mostly what I want. So I have 2 questions.
1.Is that suppose to happen?
2.Is there a better way to do that other then the way I'm doing it. Here is a sample code that I have to show what I'm talking about.
job = Array.new
10.times do |n|
job << Thread.new do
sleep 0.001
puts "done #{n}"
end
end
#job.each do |t|
#t.join
#end
puts "End of script"
Output is
End of script
If I remove the comments output is
done 1
done 0
done 7
done 6
done 5
done 4
done 3
done 2
done 9
done 8
End of script
So I use this now but I don't understand why it does that. Sometimes I notice even doing something like `echo hi` instead of sleep does the trick.
Thanks in advance.
Timing of threads isn't a defined behavior. Once you put them to sleep, they will be put in a queue to be run later. You can't ever expect it to run one way or another.
Your main program doesn't take very long to run, so it is likely to happen to finish before your other threads get picked back up to run again. Really, when you think about it, 0.001 seconds is quite a long time to computer, so spinning off 10 threads in that time is likely to happen -- but even if it takes longer, there is no guarantee the thread will resume immediately after .001 seconds. Often there's really no guarantee it won't start before .001 seconds, either, but sleep calls usually don't end early.
When you add the join calls, you are introducing additional time into your main thread which allows the other threads time to run, so this behavior is expected.

EventMachine - how can you tell if you're falling behind?

I'm looking into using the EventMachine powered twitter-stream rubygem to track and capture tweets. I'm kind of new to the whole evented programming thing. How can I tell if whatever processing I'm doing in my event loop is causing me to fall behind? Is there an easy way to check?
You can determine the latency by using a periodic timer and printing out the elapsed time. If you're using a timer of 1 second you should have about 1 second elapsed, if it's greater you know how much you're slowing down the reactor.
#last = Time.now.to_f
EM.add_periodic_timer(1) do
puts "LATENCY: #{Time.now.to_f - #last}"
#last = Time.now.to_f
end
EventMachine has a EventMachine::Queue.size method that lets you peek at the current queue and get an idea how big it is.
You could add_periodic_timer() and, in that event, get the size of the queue and print it.
If the number is not getting smaller you are at parity. If it's going up you are falling behind.

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