Background thread - multithreading

So i want to create an thread which is running until i close the Application.
But i dont know how to do that probably with TornadoFx
This is what i have and i am getting an IllegalThreadStateException.
override fun start(stage: Stage) {
super.start(stage)
thread {
Thread.sleep(2000)
println("running")
}.start()
}
Also it is only executed once and than the thread basically stops but this might be because of the exception.

What your code is doing is starting a thread using the thread builder, and then calling start on that same thread again, hence you get the IllegalThreadStateException.
The reason for this is that the kotlin thread builder has a start parameter, which by default is true. So you can just remove your .start() call and the thread would start normally. You could also pass start = false to the thread builder and instead call .start() like you did.
However, the thread code you posted will simply wait for 2 seconds, then print "running" and then exit. A thread is not a loop by default, so after 2 seconds and change, the thread has done what you asked it to.

Related

Why can a sub-classed QThread simply fail to start?

This is using a sub-classed QThread based on the ideas expressed in the whitepaper "QThreads: You were not doing so wrong". It does not have an event loop, nor does it have slots. It just emits signals and stops. In fact its primary signal is the QThread finished one.
Basically I have a Qt using a background thread to monitor stuff. Upon finding what it is looking for, it records its data, and terminates.
The termination sends a signal to the main event loop part of the application, which processes it, and when done, starts the background anew. I can usually get this working for tens of seconds, but then it just seems to quit.
It seems that when the main application tries to start the thread, it doesn't really run. I base this on telemetry code that increments counters as procedures get executed.
basically
//in main application. Setup not shown.
//background points to the QThread sub-class object
void MainWindow::StartBackground()
{
background->startcount++;
background->start();
if ( background->isRunning() )
{
background->startedcount++;
}
}
//in sub-classed QThread
void Background::run()
{
runcount++;
//Do stuff until done
}
So when I notice that it seems that my background thread isn't running, by watching Process Explorer, I cause the debugger to break in, and check the counts. What I see is that startcount and startedcount are equal. And have a value of one greater than runcount
So I can only conclude that the thread didn't really run, but I have been unable to find out any evidence of why.
I have not been able to find documentation on QThreads not starting do to some error condition, or what evidence there is of such an error.
I suppose I could set up a slot to catch started from the thread. The starting code could loop on a timed-out semaphore, trying again and again until the started slot actually resets the semaphore. But it feels ugly.
EDIT - further information
So using the semaphore method, I have a way to breakpoint on failure to start.
I sampled isFinished() right before I wanted to do start(), and it was false. After my 100ms semaphore timeout it became true.
So the question seems to be evolving into 'Why does QThread sometimes emit a finished() signal before isFinished() becomes true?'
Heck of a race condition. I'd hate to spin on isFinished() before starting the next background thread.
So this may be a duplicate of
QThread emits finished() signal but isRunning() returns true and isFinished() returns false
But not exactly, because I do override run() and I have no event loop.
In particular the events 8 and 9 in that answer are not in the same order. My slot is getting a finished() before isFinished() goes true.
I'm not sure an explicit quit() is any different than letting run() return;
It sounds as if you have a race condition wherein you may end up trying to restart your thread before the previous iteration has actually finished. If that's the case then, from what I've seen, the next call to QThread::start will be silently ignored. You need to update your code so that it checks the status of the thread before restarting -- either by calling QThread::isFinished or handling the QThread::finished signal.
On the other hand... why have the thread repeatedly started/stopped. Would it not be easier to simply start the thread once? Whatever code is run within the context of QThread::run can monitor whatever it monitors and signal the main app when it finds anything of note.
Better still. Separate the monitor logic from the thread entirely...
class monitor: public QObject {
.
.
.
};
QThread monitor_thread;
monitor monitor;
/*
* Fix up any signals to/from monitor.
*/
monitor.moveToThread(&monitor_thread);
monitor_thread.start();
The monitor class can do whatever it wants and when it's time to quit the app can just call monitor_thread::quit.
There is a race condition in the version of Qt I am using. I don't know if it was reported or not before, but I do not have the latest, so it's probably moot unless I can demonstrate it in the current version.
Similar bugs were reported here long ago:
QThread.isFinished returns False in slot connected to finished() signal
(the version I use is much more recent than Qt 4.8.5)
What more important is I can workaround it with the following code
while ( isRunning() )
{
msleep(1);
}
start();
I've run a few tests, and it never seems to take more than 1ms for the race condition to settle. Probably just needs a context switch to clean up.

Disabling a System.Threading.Timer instance while its callback is in progress

I am using two instances of System.Threading.Timer to fire off 2 tasks that are repeated periodically.
My question is: If the timer is disabled but at that point of time this timer is executing its callback on a thread, then will the Main method exit, or will it wait for the executing callbacks to complete?
In the code below, Method1RunCount is synchronized for read and write using lock statement ( this part of code is not shown below). The call back for timer1 increments Method1RunCount by 1 at end of each run.
static void Main(string[] args)
{
TimerCallback callback1 = Method1;
System.Threading.Timer timer1 = new System.Threading.Timer(callback1,null,0, 90000);
TimerCallback callback2 = Method2;
System.Threading.Timer timer2 = new System.Threading.Timer(callback2, null, 0, 60000);
while (true)
{
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(250);
if (Method1RunCount == 4)
{
//DISABLE the TIMERS
timer1.Change(System.Threading.Timeout.Infinite, System.Threading.Timeout.Infinite);
timer2.Change(System.Threading.Timeout.Infinite, System.Threading.Timeout.Infinite);
break;
}
}
}
This kind of code tends to work by accident, the period of the timer is large enough to avoid the threading race on the Method1RunCount variable. Make the period smaller and there's a real danger that the main thread won't see the value "4" at all. Odds go down considerably when the processor is heavily loaded and the main thread doesn't get scheduled for while. The timer's callback can then execute more than once while the main thread is waiting for the processor. Completing missing the value getting incremented to 4. Note how the lock statement does not in fact prevent this, it isn't locked by the main thread since it is probably sleeping.
There's also no reasonable guess you can make at how often Method2 runs. Not just because it has a completely different timer period but fundamentally because it isn't synchronized to either the Method1 or the Main method execution at all.
You'd normally increment Method1RunCount at the end of Method1. That doesn't otherwise guarantee that Method1 won't be aborted. It runs on a threadpool thread, they have the Thread.IsBackground property always set to true. So the CLR will readily abort them when the main thread exits. This again tends to not cause a problem by accident.
If it is absolutely essential that Method1 executes exactly 4 times then the simple way to ensure that is to let Method1 do the counting. Calling Timer.Change() inside the method is fine. Use a class like AutoResetEvent to let the main thread know about it. Which now no longer needs the Sleep anymore. You still need a lock to ensure that Method1 cannot be re-entered while it is executing. A good way to know that you are getting thread synchronization wrong is when you see yourself using Thread.Sleep().
From the docs on System.Threading.Timer (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.threading.timer.aspx):
When a timer is no longer needed, use the Dispose method to free the
resources held by the timer. Note that callbacks can occur after the
Dispose() method overload has been called, because the timer queues
callbacks for execution by thread pool threads. You can use the
Dispose(WaitHandle) method overload to wait until all callbacks have
completed.

MFC Threading Issue - The program doesnt end after all threads are completed

I have created a Single Dialog application which basically does a series of complex calculation. The application was first created as a Win32 console application and later I decided to add a progressbar and then I converted the console application to a Single Dialog based application. The dialog has a progressbar on it. in OnInitDialog() function of the dialog, I start the calculations. The calculations are running on a worker thread. This thread is created by calling _beginthreadex function. The progressbar is updated by the thread by posting messages to the Dialog by using PostMessage. After the thread has completed execution, I call CDialog::OnOK() function to close the dialog. The issue is that, even after the dialog is closed, the application is not end immediately. It takes nearly 2 seconds to close the application even though the dialog is closed.
Any help to solve this issue is highly appreciated.
Thanks.
It's because your worker thread is still running. The application will not terminate until all threads are finished running. Since your UI thread closes before the worker thread, the window may be hidden, but the process does not terminate until the worker thread has completed its work.
The worker thread might be still running. To make sure that the thread is stopped use events to signal . you can signal an event to kill the thread when the user presses close button in the dialog.
You can check whether the event is signaled inside your complex calculation (may be a loop) and break from it. Thus stopping the thread without any issues.
while(true)
{
//Some complex task
DWORD dwWaitResult;
dwWaitResult = WaitForSingleObject(hwndShutdownEvent,0);
if (WAIT_OBJECT_0 == dwWaitResult)
{
break;
}
}

Thread scheduling issue with MFC and AfxBeginThread

I'm creating a worker thread in MFC with AfxBeginThread, but the thread is not getting scheduled. Here's the code:
CWinThread* worker = AfxBeginThread(initialUpdateWorkerThread, this);
DWORD dwExitCode = 0;
while(GetExitCodeThread(worker->m_hThread, &dwExitCode))
{
if(dwExitCode != STILL_ACTIVE)
break;
::Sleep(100);
}
When I run this, this loop just livelocks because initialUpdateWorkerThread is never called (I've put break points and message boxes at the top of it) so dwExitCode is always STILL_ACITVE. But if I put in a call to AfxMessageBox before the loop but after AfxBeginThread then the function is called. This makes me think that somehow I'm not calling the right function to get the thread scheduled, but a call to AfxMessageBox causes it to get scheduled.
How can I force the thread to be scheduled? I would think sleep would do that, but in this case it doesn't seem to.
Your worker thread is probably trying to send your main thread a message, but since you aren't processing messages on on the main thread, the worker thread simply waits. You can confirm this by simply breaking into the debugger to see what the worker thread is doing.

parallel c++ join in .net 1.1

I'm trying to spawn and then join two threads using MS VS 6.0 (2003), MS .NET Framework 1.1.
The following seems to be a reasonable solution:
CWinThread* thread1 = AfxBeginThread(worker, &parallel_params);
CWinThread* thread2 = AfxBeginThread(worker, &parallel_params);
WaitForSingleObject(thread1->m_hThread, INFINITE);
WaitForSingleObject(thread2->m_hThread, INFINITE);
but my main concern has to do with this statement in the documentation: "If this handle is closed while the wait is still pending, the function's behavior is undefined." When do handles get closed? Does ending the worker proc close the handle? If so, am I in trouble? Is this really a reasonable solution??
In order to be able to safely wait on the thread's handle, you should:
Start the thread suspended
Set the m_bAutoDelete member to false, so that the returned CWinThread* is not deleted automatically once the thread exits
Resume the thread
And finally wait on the handle the way you do.
Alternatively, you can start the thread suspended, then duplicate the handle, leave m_bAutoDelete as is, and finally wait on the new handle. This way the CWinThread* will indeed be deleted, but you'll still have a handle to wait on. Also, don't forget to close the handle once your done waiting on it.
If you leave your code as is, you might not even get to wait on a closed handle. If the thread exits you get to the wait function, the CWinThread* pointer might point to a deleted object, and you'll get an exception.

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