Say I have a task like:
for(Object object: objects) {
Result result = compute(object);
list.add(result);
}
What is the easiest way to parallelize each compute() (assuming they are already parallelizable)?
I do not need an answer that matches strictly the code above, just a general answer. But if you need more info: my tasks are IO bound and this is for a Spring Web application and the tasks are going to be executed in a HTTP request.
I would recommend taking a look at ExecutorService.
In particular, something like this:
ExecutorService EXEC = Executors.newCachedThreadPool();
List<Callable<Result>> tasks = new ArrayList<Callable<Result>>();
for (final Object object: objects) {
Callable<Result> c = new Callable<Result>() {
@Override
public Result call() throws Exception {
return compute(object);
}
};
tasks.add(c);
}
List<Future<Result>> results = EXEC.invokeAll(tasks);
Note that using newCachedThreadPool
could be bad if objects
is a big list. A cached thread pool could create a thread per task! You may want to use newFixedThreadPool(n)
where n is something reasonable (like the number of cores you have, assuming compute()
is CPU bound).
Here's full code that actually runs:
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Random;
import java.util.concurrent.Callable;
import java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException;
import java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService;
import java.util.concurrent.Executors;
import java.util.concurrent.Future;
public class ExecutorServiceExample {
private static final Random PRNG = new Random();
private static class Result {
private final int wait;
public Result(int code) {
this.wait = code;
}
}
public static Result compute(Object obj) throws InterruptedException {
int wait = PRNG.nextInt(3000);
Thread.sleep(wait);
return new Result(wait);
}
public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException,
ExecutionException {
List<Object> objects = new ArrayList<Object>();
for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
objects.add(new Object());
}
List<Callable<Result>> tasks = new ArrayList<Callable<Result>>();
for (final Object object : objects) {
Callable<Result> c = new Callable<Result>() {
@Override
public Result call() throws Exception {
return compute(object);
}
};
tasks.add(c);
}
ExecutorService exec = Executors.newCachedThreadPool();
// some other exectuors you could try to see the different behaviours
// ExecutorService exec = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(3);
// ExecutorService exec = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor();
try {
long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
List<Future<Result>> results = exec.invokeAll(tasks);
int sum = 0;
for (Future<Result> fr : results) {
sum += fr.get().wait;
System.out.println(String.format("Task waited %d ms",
fr.get().wait));
}
long elapsed = System.currentTimeMillis() - start;
System.out.println(String.format("Elapsed time: %d ms", elapsed));
System.out.println(String.format("... but compute tasks waited for total of %d ms; speed-up of %.2fx", sum, sum / (elapsed * 1d)));
} finally {
exec.shutdown();
}
}
}