I'm building a multi-threaded service application in Delphi XE2. Each thread serves its own purpose apart from the other ones. The main service thread is only responsible for keeping the other threads going and saving a log file, etc. Each of these threads reports back to the main service thread through synchronized event triggers. These threads are created when the service starts and destroyed when the service ends.
I'd like to introduce a separate thread as a centralized database connection to avoid having to create many instances of TADOConnection. My service code can call standard functions such as UserListDataSet := DBThread.GetUserList(SomeUserListDataSet); or it would also be nice if I could send direct SQL statements like SomeDataSet := DBThread.Get(MySqlText);. I'd also like to avoid too many occasions of CoInitialize() etc.
The job threads will need to use this db thread. I need to figure out how to "ask" it for certain data, "wait" for a response, and "acquire" that response back in the thread which requested it. I'm sure there are many approaches to this, but I need to know which one is best suited for my scenario. Windows messages? Events? Should I have some sort of queue? Should it send data sets or something else? Is there already something that can do this? I need to figure out how to structure this DB thread in a way that it can be re-used from other threads.
The structure looks like this:
+ SvcThread
+ DBThread
+ TADOConnection
+ Thread1
+ Thread2
+ Thread3
I need threads 1 2 and 3 to send requests to the DBThread. When a thread sends any request to it, it needs to wait until it gets a response. Once there's a response, the DB Thread needs to notify the asking thread. Each of the threads might send a request to this DB Thread at the same time too.
A good tutorial on how to accomplish this would be perfect - it just needs to be a suitable fit for my scenario. I don't need to know just "how to make two threads talk together" but rather "how to make many threads talk to a centralized database thread". These job threads are created as children of the main service thread, and are not owned by the db thread. The db thread has no knowledge of the job threads.
Normally, you'd have a request queue where all the requests are stored. Your database thread reads a request from the queue, handles it, then invokes a callback routine specified by the requester to handle the result. Not sure how this maps to Delphi paradigms, but the basics should be the same.
Do any of the "requesting" threads have anything profitable that they could be doing while they are waiting for a response to be obtained from the database? If the answer is "no," as I suspect that it is quite likely to be, then perhaps you can simplify your situation quite a bit by eliminating the need for "a DB thread" completely. Perhaps all of the threads can simply share a single database-connection in turn, employing a mutual-exclusion object to cause them to "wait their turn."
Under this scenario, there would be one database-connection, and any thread which needed to use it would do so. But they would be obliged to obtain a mutex object first, hold on to the mutex during the time they were doing database queries, and then release the mutex so that the next thread could have its turn.
If you decide that it is somehow advantageous (or a necessity...) to dedicate a thread to managing the connection, then perhaps you could achieve the result using (a) a mutex to serialize the requests, as before; and (b) one event-object to signal the DB-thread that a new request has been posted, and (c) another event-object to signal the requester that the request has been completed.
In either case, if you have indeed determined that the requester threads have nothing useful that they could be doing in the meantime, you have the threads "simply sleeping" until their turn comes up. Then, they do their business, either directly or indirectly. There are no "queues," no complicated shared data-structures, simply because you have (say...) determined that there is no need for them.
I think using a DB connection pool would be a better fit for your problem. This would also allow you to scale your application later on without having to then create additional DB thread and then having to manage "load balancing" for those DB threads.
Since you are mentioning using TADOConnection please have a look at this implementation made by Cary Jensen http://cc.embarcadero.com/item/19975.
I am successfully using this DB connection pool in several applications. I have modified it in several ways, including using an ini file to control: maximum number of connections, cleanup time, timeout times etc.
Cary has written several articles that serves as documentation for it. One is here http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/30027.
Related
I'm investigating what reactive means and because it is kind of low level difference, compared to the common non-reactive approach, I'd like to understand what is going on. Let's take Tomcat as a server(I guess it will be different for netty)
Non-reactive
Connection from the browser is created.
For each request thread from thread pool is taken, which will process it.
After the thread finished processing, it returns the result through the connection back to other side.
Reactive???
How is it done for Tomcat or Netty. I cannot find any decent article about how Tomcat supports reactive apps and how Netty does that differently(Connection, Thread, request level explanation)
What bothers me is how reactive is making the webserver unblocking, when you still need to wait for the response. You can get first part of the response quicker maybe with reactive, but is it all? I guess the main point of reactivness is effective thread utilization and this is what I am asking about.
The last point by you : " I guess the main point of reactiveness is effective thread utilization and this is what I am asking about.", is exactly what reactive approach was designed for.
So how does effective utilization achieved?
Well, as an example, lets say you are requesting data from a server multiple times.
In a typical non-reactive way, you will be creating/using multiple threads(may be from a thread-pool) for each of your requests. And job of one particular thread is only to serve that particular request. The thread will take the request, give it to the server and waits for its response till the data is fetched from the server, and then bring that data back to the client.
Now, in a Reactive way, once there is a request, a thread will be allocated for it. Now if another request comes up, there won't be creation of another thread, rather it will be served by the same thread. How?
The thread when takes a request to the server, it won't wait for any immediate response from the server, rather it will come back and serve other request.
Now, when server searches for the data and it is available with the server, an event will be raised, and then the thread will go to fetch that data. This is called Event-loop mechanism as all the work of calling the thread when data is available is achieved by invoking an event.
Now, there is complexity assigned with it to map exact response to requests.
And all these complexity is abstracted by Spring-Webflux(in Java).
So the whole process becomes non-blocking. And as only one thread is enough to serve all the requests, there will be no thread switching we can have one thread per CPU core. Thus achieving effective utilization of threads.
Few images over the net to help you understand: ->
I am new to netty. I would like to develop a server which aims at receiving requests from possibly few(say Max is of 2) clients. But each client will be sending many requests to server continuously. Server has to process such requests and respond to client. So, here I assume that even though if I configure multiple worker threds,it may not be useful as there are only 2 active connections. Worker thread again block till it process and respond to client. So, please let me know how to handle these type of problems.
If I use threadpoolexecutor in worker thread to process both clients requests in multi threaded manner, will it be efficient? Or if it cane achieved through netty framework, plz let me know how to do this?
Thanks in advance...
If I understand correctly: your clients (2) will send many messages, each of them implying an answear as quickly as possible from the server.
2 options can be seen:
The answear process is short time (short enough to not be an isssue for the rate you want to reach, meaning 1 thread is able to answear as fast as you need for 1 client): then you can stay with the standard threads from Netty (1 worker thread for 1 client at a time) set up in the server bootstrap. This is the shortest path.
The answear process is not short time enough (the rate will be terrible, for instance because there is a "long time" process, such as blocking call, database access, file writing, ...): then you can add a thread pool (a group) in the Netty pipeline for you ChannelHandler doing such blocking/long process.
Here is an extract of the API documentation taken from ChannelPipeline:
http://netty.io/4.0/api/io/netty/channel/ChannelPipeline.html
// Tell the pipeline to run MyBusinessLogicHandler's event handler methods
// in a different thread than an I/O thread so that the I/O thread is not blocked by
// a time-consuming task.
// If your business logic is fully asynchronous or finished very quickly, you don't
// need to specify a group.
pipeline.addLast(group, "handler", new MyBusinessLogicHandler());
just add a ChannelHandler with a special EventExecutorGroup to the ChannelPipeline. For example UnorderedThreadPoolEventExecutor (src).
something like this.
UnorderedThreadPoolEventExecutor executorGroup = ...;
pipeline.addLast(executorGroup, new MyChannelHandler());
I have a WCF web service hosted in IIS- This service has a method - lets call it DoSomething(). DoSomething() is called from a client-side application.
DoSomething performs some work and returns the answer to the user. Now I need to log how often DoSomething is being called. I can add it to the DoSomething function so that it will for every call write to an sql database and update a counter, but this will slow down the DoSomething method as the user needs to wait for this extra database call.
Is it a good option to let the DoSomething method spawn a new thread which will update the counter in the database, and then just return the answer from the DoSomething method to the user without waiting for the thread to finnish? Then I will not know if the database update fails, but that is not critical.
Any problems with spawning a new background thread and not wait for it to finnish in WCF? Or is there a better way to solve this?
Update: To ask the question in a little different way. Is it a bad idea to spawn new threads insde a wcf web service method?
The main issue is one of reliability. Is this a call you care about? If the IIS process crashes after you returned the response, but before your thread completes, does it matter? If no, then you can use client side C# tools. If it does matter, then you must use a reliable queuing technology.
If you use the client side then spawning a new thread just to block on a DB call is never the correct answer. What you want is to make the call async, and for that you use SqlCommand.BeginExecute after you ensure that AsyncronousProcessing is enabled on the connection.
If you need reliable processing then you can use a pattern like Asynchronous procedure execution which relies on persisted queues.
As a side note things like logging, or hit counts, and the like are a huge performance bottleneck if done in the naive approach of writing to the database on every single HTTP request. You must batch and flush.
If you want to only track a single method like DoSomething() in service then you can create an custom operation behavior and apply it over the method.
The operation behavior will contain the code that logs the info to database. In that operation behavior you can use the .NET 4.0's new TPL library to create a task that will take care of database logging. If you use TPL you don't need to worry about directly creating threads.
The advantage of using operation behvaior tomorrow you need to track another method then at that time instead of duplicating the code there you are just going to mark the method with the custom operation behavior. If you want to track all the methods then you should go for service behavior.
To know more about operation behaviors check http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.servicemodel.operationbehaviorattribute.aspx
To know more about TPL(Task Parallel Library) check http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd460717.aspx
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.
It seems like the classical way to handle transactions with JDBC is to set auto-commit to false. This creates a new transaction, and each call to commit marks the beginning the next transactions.
On multithreading app, I understand that it is common practice to open a new connection for each thread.
I am writing a RMI based multi-client server application, so that basically my server is seamlessly spawning one thread for each new connection.
To handle transactions correctly should I go and create a new connection for each of those thread ?
Isn't the cost of such an architecture prohibitive?
Yes, in general you need to create a new connection for each thread. You don't have control over how the operating system timeslices execution of threads (notwithstanding defining your own critical sections), so you could inadvertently have multiple threads trying to send data down that one pipe.
Note the same applies to any network communications. If you had two threads trying to share one socket with an HTTP connection, for instance.
Thread 1 makes a request
Thread 2 makes a request
Thread 1 reads bytes from the socket, unwittingly reading the response from thread 2's request
If you wrapped all your transactions in critical sections, and therefore lock out any other threads for an entire begin/commit cycle, then you might be able to share a database connection between threads. But I wouldn't do that even then, unless you really have innate knowledge of the JDBC protocol.
If most of your threads have infrequent need for database connections (or no need at all), you might be able to designate one thread to do your database work, and have other threads queue their requests to that one thread. That would reduce the overhead of so many connections. But you'll have to figure out how to manage connections per thread in your environment (or ask another specific question about that on StackOverflow).
update: To answer your question in the comment, most database brands don't support multiple concurrent transactions on a single connection (InterBase/Firebird is the only exception I know of).
It'd be nice to have a separate transaction object, and to be able to start and commit multiple transactions per connection. But vendors simply don't support it.
Likewise, standard vendor-independent APIs like JDBC and ODBC make the same assumption, that transaction state is merely a property of the connection object.
It's uncommon practice to open a new connection for each thread.
Usually you use a connection pool like c3po library.
If you are in an application server, or using Hibernate for example, look at the documentation and you will find how to configure the connection pool.
The same connection object can be used to create multiple statement objects and these statement objects can then used by different threads concurrently. Most modern DBs interfaced by JDBC can do that. The JDBC is thus able to make use of concurrent cursors as follows. PostgreSQL is no exception here, see for example:
http://doc.postgresintl.com/jdbc/ch10.html
This allows connection pooling where the connection are only used for a short time, namely to created the statement object and but after that returned to the pool. This short time pooling is only recommended when the JDBC connection does also parallelization of statement operations, otherwise normal connection pooling might show better results. Anyhow the thread can continue work with the statement object and close it later, but not the connection.
1. Thread 1 opens statement
3. Thread 2 opens statement
4. Thread 1 does something Thread 2 does something
5. ... ...
6. Thread 1 closes statement ...
7. Thread 2 closes statement
The above only works in auto commit mode. If transactions are needed there is still no need to tie the transaction to a thread. You can just partition the pooling along the transactions that is all and use the same approach as above. But this is only needed not because of some socket connection limitation but because the JDBC then equates the session ID with the transaction ID.
If I remember well there should be APIs and products around with a less simplistic design, where teh session ID and the transaction ID are not equated. In this APIs you could write your server with one single database connection object, even when it does
transactions. Will need to check and tell you later what this APIs and products are.