JBPM - Locking When Accessing KieSession From Different Thread - multithreading

I am doing an upgrade from JBPM 3 to 7. The Process Instances runs on a different thread, Sometimes the UI thread needs to access the process Instance via the KIESession. If I try to execute an operation for example sending a signal the UI is blocked until the process instances finish.
I noticed this also happens if I try to about the process Instance, get the status of the the ProcessInstance and get a variable from the process Instance.
I looked further into it and the PersistableRunner.execute() is synchronized .
FYI I am using the per-process Instance strategy.
Is there a way to get around this issue?
A snippet of the thread DUMP:
java.lang.Thread.State: BLOCKED
waiting for JBPM-Processor-5692548#955268 to release lock on <0xb176> (a org.drools.persistence.PersistableRunner)
at org.drools.persistence.PersistableRunner.execute(PersistableRunner.java:400)
at org.drools.persistence.PersistableRunner.execute(PersistableRunner.java:68)
I tried using the singleton strategy
I would like to be able to access a running KieSession from a different threat without being blocked.

Related

Why does a thread pool create a lot of unique threads?

A COM application based on the 'free' threading model subscribes to events published from another COM application that runs out of process.
The application works normally. But in some cases (or configurations?) it burns through a lot of so called Tpp worker threads.
These threads apparently belong to a thread pool managed by Windows/COM. And they are at least used by COM to deliver incoming events to the application.
When the application receives events, that always happens in the context of one of these worker threads.
In the normal situation, updates are coming in from at most 2 or 3 unique worker threads.
But in the abnormal situation the application sees new & unique worker thread IDs appear every 3-8 minutes. Over the course of a week the application has seen about 1000 unique threads (!).
I highly suspect there is something wrong here. Because surely the thread pool doesn't need so many different threads, right?
What could be a reason for the thread pool behavior I'm seeing. Is it just normal that it creates different threads from time to time? Are the old threads still sticking around doing nothing? What action could trigger this while the application is running in the context of the worker thread?
Notes:
Our application is an OPC DA client (and the other application is the Siemens OPC-DA server)
The OS is Windows 10
I do not yet know if the worker threads have exited or that they stick around doing nothing
By way of an experiment I have tried several bad/illegal things to see if it is possible for our application to somehow break a worker thread
- which would then explain why the thread pool would have to create a new one - we might have destroyed the old one. But that seems more difficult than I had expected:
When running in the context of the worker thread, I have tried...
deliberately hanging with while (true) {}, result: event delivery process just stalls, no new worker thread is being created for us though
the deliberate uncaught c++ exception, no new worker thread is created
triggering a deliberate (read) access violation, no new thread either...
And that got me thinking, if our application can't kill that worker thread in an obvious way, what else could or why would the thread pool behave like this?

ServiceStack MQ server shutdown does not wait for worker background threads to complete

I'm using ServiceStack MQ (ServiceStack.Aws.Sqs.SqsMqServer v4.0.54).
I'm running MQ server inside a Windows Service.
My Goal:
When the Windows service is about to shutdown, I would like to
wait for all running workers to finish processing and then terminate
the MqServer.
Problem:
The ServiceStack MqServer (whether it's Redis/RabbitMq/Sqs) has a Stop() method. But it does not block until all workers complete their work. It merely
pulses the background thread to stop the workers and then it returns.
Then the Windows Service process stops, and existing workers get aborted.
This is the link to github source code -> https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/blob/75847c737f9c0cd9f5dd4ea3ae1113dace56cbf2/src/ServiceStack.RabbitMq/RabbitMqServer.cs#L451
Temporary Workaround:
I subclass SqsMqServer, loop through the protected member 'workers' in the base class, and call Stop on each one. (in this case, this Stop() method is implemented correctly as a blocking call. It waits indefinitely until the worker is done with whatever it's currently working on).
Is my current understanding of how to shutdown the MqServer correct? Is this a bug or something I misunderstood.
The source code for SqsMqServer is maintained in the ServiceStack.Aws repository.
The Stop() method pulses the bg thread which StopWorkerThreads() and that goes through and stops all workers.

Node/Express: running specific CPU-instensive tasks in the background

I have a site that makes the standard data-bound calls, but then also have a few CPU-intensive tasks which are ran a few times per day, mainly by the admin.
These tasks include grabbing data from the db, running a few time-consuming different algorithms, then reuploading the data. What would be the best method for making these calls and having them run without blocking the event loop?
I definitely want to keep the calculations on the server so web workers wouldn't work here. Would a child process be enough here? Or should I have a separate thread running in the background handling all /api/admin calls?
The basic answer to this scenario in Node.js land is to use the core cluster module - https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/cluster.html
It is an acceptable API to :
easily launch worker node.js instances on the same machine (each instance will have its own event loop)
keep a live communication channel for short messages between instances
this way, any work done in the child instance will not block your master event loop.

multithreading in ASP.Net webservice - what happens after the main thread completes?

I have inherited a set of legacy webservices (VB.Net, IIS hosted ASMX) in which some of the WebMethods are using basic multithreading.
It seems like they have done this to allow the WebMethod to return to the client quicker with a response, while still doing some longer running operations that do not impact the response object itself (such as cleanup operations, logging, etc).
My question is, what happens in this webservice when the main thread (that which created the WebMethod instance) completes? Do these other threads terminate or does it actually block the main thread from completing if the other threads are not complete? Or, do the threads run to completion on the IIS process?
Threads are independent of each other unless one thread waits on another. Once created, there is nothing stopping the request (main) thread from completing, and any other threads simply complete on their own.

Working with TADOQuery in thread

I'm writing the application, which connects to the DB and repetitively (1 minute interval) reads the data from a database. It's something like RSS feed reader, but with local DB. If the data reading fails, I try to reestablish the connection. I've designed it with TADOConnection and TADOQuery placed on the form (so with no dynamic creation). My aim is to keep the application "alive" from the user's point of view, so I placed the connection and the reading part into a single thread. The question is, how to do it best way ?
My design looks like this:
application start, the TADOConnection and TADOQuery are created along with the form
open connection in a separate thread (TADOConnection)
if the connection is established, suspend the connection thread, start the timer on the form, which periodically resumes another thread for data reading
if the reading thread succeeds, nothing happens and form timer keeps going, if it fails, the thread stops the timer and resume connection thread
Is it better to create TADOConnection or TADOQuery dynamically or it doesn't matter ? Is it better to use e.g. critical section in the threads or something (I have only one access to the component at the same time and only one thread) ?
Thanks for your suggestions
This question is fairly subjective, probably not subjective enough to get closed but subjective any way. Here's why I'd go for dynamically created ADO objects:
Keeps everything together: the code and the objects used to access the code. Using data access objects created on the form requires the Thread to have intimate knowledge of the Form's inner workings, that's never a good idea.
It's safer because you can't access those objects from other threads (including the main VCL thread). Sure, you're not planing on using those connections for anything else, you're not planning on using multiple threads etc, but maybe you'll some day forget about those restrictions.
It's future-proof. You might want to use that same thread from an other project. You might want to add an second thread accesing some other data to the same app.
I have a personal preference for creating data access objects dynamically from code. Yes, an subjective answer to a subjective question.
Run everything in the thread. Have a periodic timer in the thread that opens the DB connection, reads the data, "posts" it back to the main thread, and then disconnects. The thread needs to "sleep" while waiting for the time, e.g. on a Windows even that is signalled by the timer. The DB components, which are local and private to the thread, can be created inside the thread when thread executions starts (on application startup), and freed when thread execution finishes (on application shutdown). This will always work, regardless of whether the DB conncetion is temporarily available or not, and the main thread does not even have to communicate with the "DB thread". It is an architcture that I use all the time and is absolulutely bullet-proof.

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