Thread and Queue

Question

I am interested in knowing what would be the best way to implement a thread based queue.

For example:

I have 10 actions which I want to execute with only 4 threads. I would like to create a queue with all the 10 actions placed linearly and start the first 4 action with 4 threads, once one of the thread is done executing, the next one will start etc - So at a time, the number of thread is either 4 or less than 4.

Answer 1

There is a Queue class in thread in the standard library. Using that you can do something like this:

require 'thread'

queue = Queue.new
threads = []

# add work to the queue
queue << work_unit

4.times do
  threads << Thread.new do
    # loop until there are no more things to do
    until queue.empty?
      # pop with the non-blocking flag set, this raises
      # an exception if the queue is empty, in which case
      # work_unit will be set to nil
      work_unit = queue.pop(true) rescue nil
      if work_unit
        # do work
      end
    end
    # when there is no more work, the thread will stop
  end
end

# wait until all threads have completed processing
threads.each { |t| t.join }

The reason I pop with the non-blocking flag is that between the until queue.empty? and the pop another thread may have pop'ed the queue, so unless the non-blocking flag is set we could get stuck at that line forever.

If you're using MRI, the default Ruby interpreter, bear in mind that threads will not be absolutely concurrent. If your work is CPU bound you may just as well run single threaded. If you have some operation that blocks on IO you may get some parallelism, but YMMV. Alternatively, you can use an interpreter that allows full concurrency, such as jRuby or Rubinius.