Parallel.ForEach Ordered Execution - c#-4.0

I am trying to execute parallel functions on a list of objects using the new C# 4.0 Parallel.ForEach function. This is a very long maintenance process. I would like to make it execute in the order of the list so that I can stop and continue execution at the previous point. How do I do this?
Here is an example. I have a list of objects: a1 to a100. This is the current order:
a1, a51, a2, a52, a3, a53...
I want this order:
a1, a2, a3, a4...
I am OK with some objects being run out of order, but as long as I can find a point in the list where I can say that all objects before this point were run. I read the parallel programming csharp whitepaper and didn't see anything about it. There isn't a setting for this in the ParallelOptions class.

Do something like this:
int current = 0;
object lockCurrent = new object();
Parallel.For(0, list.Count,
new ParallelOptions { MaxDegreeOfParallelism = MaxThreads },
(ii, loopState) => {
// So the way Parallel.For works is that it chunks the task list up with each thread getting a chunk to work on...
// e.g. [1-1,000], [1,001- 2,000], [2,001-3,000] etc...
// We have prioritized our job queue such that more important tasks come first. So we don't want the task list to be
// broken up, we want the task list to be run in roughly the same order we started with. So we ignore tha past in
// loop variable and just increment our own counter.
int thisCurrent = 0;
lock (lockCurrent) {
thisCurrent = current;
current++;
}
dothework(list[thisCurrent]);
});
You can see how when you break out of the parallel for loop you will know the last list item to be executed, assuming you let all threads finish prior to breaking. I'm not a big fan of PLINQ or LINQ. I honestly don't see how writing LINQ/PLINQ leads to maintainable source code or readability.... Parallel.For is a much better solution.

If you use Parallel.Break to terminate the loop then you are guarenteed that all indices below the returned value will have been executed. This is about as close as you can get. The example here uses For but ForEach has similar overloads.
int n = ...
var result = new double[n];
var loopResult = Parallel.For(0, n, (i, loopState) =>
{
if (/* break condition is true */)
{
loopState.Break();
return;
}
result[i] = DoWork(i);
});
if (!loopResult.IsCompleted &&
loopResult.LowestBreakIteration.HasValue)
{
Console.WriteLine("Loop encountered a break at {0}",
loopResult.LowestBreakIteration.Value);
}
In a ForEach loop, an iteration index is generated internally for each element in each partition. Execution takes place out of order but after break you know that all the iterations lower than LowestBreakIteration will have been completed.
Taken from "Parallel Programming with Microsoft .NET" http://parallelpatterns.codeplex.com/
Available on MSDN. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff963552.aspx. The section "Breaking out of loops early" covers this scenario.
See also: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd460721.aspx

For anyone else who comes across this question - if you're looping over an array or list (rather than an IEnumberable ), you can use the overload of Parallel.Foreach that gives the element index to maintain original order too.
string[] MyArray; // array of stuff to do parallel tasks on
string[] ProcessedArray = new string[MyArray.Length];
Parallel.ForEach(MyArray, (ArrayItem,loopstate,ArrayElementIndex) =>
{
string ProcessedArrayItem = TaskToDo(ArrayItem);
ProcessedArray[ArrayElementIndex] = ProcessedArrayItem;
});

As an alternate suggestion, you could record which object have been run and then filter the list when you resume exection to exclude the objects which have already run.
If this needs to be persistent across application restarts, you can store the ID's of the already executed objects (I assume here the objects have some unique identifier).

For anybody looking for a simple solution, I have posted 2 extension methods (one using PLINQ and one using Parallel.ForEach) as part of an answer to the following question:
Ordered PLINQ ForAll

Not sure if question was altered as my comment seems wrong.
Here improved, basically remind that parallel jobs run in out of your control order.
ea printing 10 numbers might result in 1,4,6,7,2,3,9,0.
If you like to stop your program and continue later.
Problems alike this usually endup in batching workloads.
And have some logging of what was done.
Say if you had to check 10.000 numbers for prime or so.
You could loop in batches of size 100, and have a prime log1, log2, log3
log1= 0..99
log2=100..199
Be sure to set some marker to know if a batch job was finished.
Its a general aprouch since the question isnt that exact either.

Related

Sink to java list possible with Hazelcast Jet?

I have a list of accounts and perform a hashjoin on ticks and return the accounts with ticks data. But after hashjoin I have drainTo lListJet and then read it with DistributedStream and return it.
public List<Account> populateTicksInAccounts(List<Account> accounts) {
...
...
Pipeline p = Pipeline.create();
BatchSource<Tick> ticksSource = Sources.list(TICKS_LIST_NAME);
BatchSource<Account> accountSource = Sources.fromProcessor(AccountProcessor.of(accounts));
p.drawFrom(ticksSource)
.hashJoin(p.drawFrom(accountSource), JoinClause.joinMapEntries(Tick::getTicker), accountMapper())
.drainTo(Sinks.list(TEMP_LIST));
jet.newJob(p).join();
IListJet<Account> list = jet.getList(TEMP_LIST);
return DistributedStream.fromList(list).collect(DistributedCollectors.toIList());
}
Is it possible to drainTo to java List instead of lListJet after performing a hashjoin?
Something like below is possible?
IListJet<Account> accountWithTicks = new ArrayList<>();
p.drawFrom(ticksSource)
.hashJoin(p.drawFrom(accountSource), JoinClause.joinMapEntries(Tick::getTicker), accountMapper())
.drainTo(<CustomSinkProcessor(accountWithTicks)>);
return accountWithTicks;
where in CustomSinkProcessor will take empty java list and return with the accounts?
Keep in mind that the code you submit to Jet for execution runs outside the process where you submit it from. While it would be theoretically possible to provide the API you're asking for, under the hood it would just have to perform some tricks to run the code on each member of the cluster, let all members send their results to one place, and fill up a list to return to you. It would go against the nature of distributed computing.
If you think it will help the readability of your code, you can write a helper method such as this:
public <T, R> List<R> drainToList(GeneralStage<T> stage) {
String tmpListName = randomListName();
SinkStage sinkStage = stage.drainTo(Sinks.list(tmpListName));
IListJet<R> tmpList = jet.getList(tmpListName);
try {
jet.newJob(sinkStage.getPipeline()).join();
return new ArrayList<>(tmpList);
} finally {
tmpList.destroy();
}
}
Especially note the line
return new ArrayList<>(tmpList);
as opposed to your
IListJet<Account> list = jet.getList(TEMP_LIST);
return DistributedStream.fromList(list).collect(DistributedCollectors.toIList());
This just copies one Hazelcast list to another one and returns a handle to it. Now you have leaked two lists in the Jet cluster. They don't automatically disappear when you stop using them.
Even the code I provided can still be leaky. The JVM process that runs it can die during Job.join() without reaching finally. Then the temporary list lingers on.
No, it's not, due to the distributed nature of Jet. The sink will execute in multiple parallel processors (workers). It can't add to plain Collection. The sink has to be able to insert items on multiple cluster members.

How to save data using multiple threads in grails-2.4.4 application using thread pool

I have a multithreaded program running some logic to come up with rows of data that I need to save in my grails (2.4.4) application. I am using a fixedthreadpool with 30 threads. The skeleton of my program is below. My expectation is that each thread calculates all the attributes and saves on a row in the table. However, the end result I am seeing is that there are some random rows that are not saved. Upon repeating this exercise, it is seen that a different set of rows are not saved in the table. So, overall, each time this is attempted a certain set of rows are NOT saved in table at all. GORMInstance.errors did not reveal any errors. So, I have no clue what is incorrect in this program.
ExecutorService exeSvc = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(30)
for (obj in list){
exeSvc.execute({-> finRunnable obj} as Callable)
}
Also, here's the runnable program that the above snippet invokes.
def finRunnable = {obj ->
for (item in LIST-1){
for (it in LIST-2){
for (i in LIST-3){
rowdata = calculateValues(item, it, i);
GORMInstance instance = new GORMInstance();
instance.withTransaction{
instance.attribute1=rowdata[0];
instance.attribute2=rowdata[1];
......so on..
instance.save(flush:true)/*without flush:true, I am
running into HeuristicCompletion exception. So I need it
here. */
}//endTransaction
}//forloop 3
}//forloop 2
}//forloop 1
}//runnable closure

CRM PlugIn Pass Variable Flag to New Execution Pipeline

I have records that have an index attribute to maintain their position in relation to each other.
I have a plugin that performs a renumbering operation on these records when the index is changed or new one created. There are specific rules that apply to items that are at the first and last position in the list.
If a new (or existing changed) item is inserted into the middle (not technically the middle...just somewhere between start and end) of the list a renumbering kicks off to make room for the record.
This renumbering process fires in a new execution pipeline...We are updating record D. When I tell record E to change (to make room for D) that of course fires the plugin on update message.
This renumbering is fine until we reach the end of the list where the plugin then gets into a loop with the first business rule that maintains the first and last record differently.
So I am trying to think of ways to pass a flag to the execution context spawned by the renumbering process so the recursion skips the boundary edge business rules if IsRenumbering == true.
My thoughts / ideas:
I have thought of using the Depth check > 1 but that isn't a reliable value as I can't explicitly turn it on or off....it may happen to work but that is not engineering a solid solution that is hoping nothing goes bump. Further a colleague far more knowledgeable than I said that when a workflow calls a plugin the depth value is off and can't be trusted.
All my variables are scoped at the execute level so as to avoid variable pollution at the class level....However if I had a dictionary object, tuple, something at the class level and one value would be the thread id and the other the flag value then perhaps my subsequent execution context could check if the same owning thread id had any values entered.
Any thoughts or other ideas on how to pass context information to a new pipeline would be greatly appreciated.
Per Nicknow sugestion I tried sharedvariables but they seem to be going out of scope...:
First time firing post op:
if (base.Stage == EXrmPluginStepStage.PostOperation)
{
...snip...
foreach (var item in RenumberSet)
{
Context.ParentContext.SharedVariables[recordrenumbering] = "googly";
Entity renumrec = new Entity("abcd") { Id = item.Id };
#region We either add or subtract indexes based upon sortdir
...snip...
renumrec["abc_indexfield"] = TmpIdx + 1;
break;
.....snip.....
#endregion
OrganizationService.Update(renumrec);
}
}
Now we come into Pre-Op of the recursion process kicked off by the above post-op OrganizationService.Update(renumrec); and it seems based upon this check the sharedvariable didn't carry over...???
if (!Context.SharedVariables.Contains(recordrenumbering))
{
//Trace.Trace("Null Set");
//Context.SharedVariables[recordrenumbering] = IsRenumbering;
Context.SharedVariables[recordrenumbering] = "Null Set";
}
throw invalidpluginexception reveals:
Sanity Checks:
Depth : 2
Entity: ...
Message: Update
Stage: PreOperation [20]
User: 065507fe-86df-e311-95fe-00155d050605
Initiating User: 065507fe-86df-e311-95fe-00155d050605
ContextEntityName: ....
ContextParentEntityName: ....
....
IsRenumbering: Null Set
What are you looking for is IExecutionContext.SharedVariables. Whatever you add here is available throughout the entire transaction. Since you'll have child pipelines you'll want to look at the ParentContext for the value. This can all get a little tricky, so be sure to do a lot of testing - I've run into many issues with SharedVariables and looping operations in Dynamics CRM.
Here is some sample (very untested) code to get you started.
public static bool GetIsRenumbering(IPluginExecutionContext pluginContext)
{
var keyName = "IsRenumbering";
var ctx = pluginContext;
while (ctx != null)
{
if (ctx.SharedVariables.Contains(keyName))
{
return (bool)ctx.SharedVariables[keyName];
}
else ctx = ctx.ParentContext;
}
return false;
}
public static void SetIsRenumbering(IPluginExecutionContext pluginContext)
{
var keyName = "IsRenumbering";
var ctx = pluginContext;
ctx.SharedVariables.Add(keyName, true);
}
A very simple solution: add a bit field to the entity called "DisableIndexRecalculation." When your first plugin runs, make sure to set that field to true for all of your updates. In the same plugin, check to see if "DisableIndexRecalculation" is set to true: if so, set it to null (by removing it from the TargetEntity entirely) and stop executing the plugin. If it is null, do your index recalculation.
Because you are immediately removing the field from the TargetEntity if it is true the value will never be persisted to the database so there will be no performance penalty.

How to maintain counters with LinqToObjects?

I have the following c# code:
private XElement BuildXmlBlob(string id, Part part, out int counter)
{
// return some unique xml particular to the parameters passed
// remember to increment the counter also before returning.
}
Which is called by:
var counter = 0;
result.AddRange(from rec in listOfRecordings
from par in rec.Parts
let id = GetId("mods", rec.CKey + par.UniqueId)
select BuildXmlBlob(id, par, counter));
Above code samples are symbolic of what I am trying to achieve.
According to the Eric Lippert, the out keyword and linq does not mix. OK fair enough but can someone help me refactor the above so it does work? A colleague at work mentioned accumulator and aggregate functions but I am novice to Linq and my google searches were bearing any real fruit so I thought I would ask here :).
To Clarify:
I am counting the number of parts I might have which could be any number of them each time the code is called. So every time the BuildXmlBlob() method is called, the resulting xml produced will have a unique element in there denoting the 'partNumber'.
So if the counter is currently on 7, that means we are processing 7th part so far!! That means XML returned from BuildXmlBlob() will have the counter value embedded in there somewhere. That's why I need it somehow to be passed and incremented every time the BuildXmlBlob() is called per run through.
If you want to keep this purely in LINQ and you need to maintain a running count for use within your queries, the cleanest way to do so would be to make use of the Select() overloads that includes the index in the query to get the current index.
In this case, it would be cleaner to do a query which collects the inputs first, then use the overload to do the projection.
var inputs =
from recording in listOfRecordings
from part in recording.Parts
select new
{
Id = GetId("mods", recording.CKey + part.UniqueId),
Part = part,
};
result.AddRange(inputs.Select((x, i) => BuildXmlBlob(x.Id, x.Part, i)));
Then you wouldn't need to use the out/ref parameter.
XElement BuildXmlBlob(string id, Part part, int counter)
{
// implementation
}
Below is what I managed to figure out on my own:.
result.AddRange(listOfRecordings.SelectMany(rec => rec.Parts, (rec, par) => new {rec, par})
.Select(#t => new
{
#t,
Id = GetStructMapItemId("mods", #t.rec.CKey + #t.par.UniqueId)
})
.Select((#t, i) => BuildPartsDmdSec(#t.Id, #t.#t.par, i)));
I used resharper to convert it into a method chain which constructed the basics for what I needed and then i simply tacked on the select statement right at the end.

Multi-threading on a foreach loop?

I want to process some data. I have about 25k items in a Dictionary. IN a foreach loop, I query a database to get results on that item. They're added as value to the Dictionary.
foreach (KeyValuePair<string, Type> pair in allPeople)
{
MySqlCommand comd = new MySqlCommand("SELECT * FROM `logs` WHERE IP = '" + pair.Key + "' GROUP BY src", con);
MySqlDataReader reader2 = comd.ExecuteReader();
Dictionary<string, Dictionary<int, Log>> allViews = new Dictionary<string, Dictionary<int, Log>>();
while (reader2.Read())
{
if (!allViews.ContainsKey(reader2.GetString("src")))
{
allViews.Add(reader2.GetString("src"), reader2.GetInt32("time"));
}
}
reader2.Close();
reader2.Dispose();
allPeople[pair.Key].View = allViews;
}
I was hoping to be able to do this faster by multi-threading. I have 8 threads available, and CPU usage is about 13%. I just don't know if it will work because it's relying on the MySQL server. On the other hand, maybe 8 threads would open 8 DB connections, and so be faster.
Anyway, if multi-threading would help in my case, how? o.O I've never worked with (multiple) threads, so any help would be great :D
MySqlDataReader is stateful - you call Read() on it and it moves to the next row, so each thread needs their own reader, and you need to concoct a query so they get different values. That might not be too hard, as you naturally have many queries with different values of pair.Key.
You also need to either have a temp dictionary per thread, and then merge them, or use a lock to prevent concurrent modification of the dictionary.
The above assumes that MySQL will allow a single connection to perform concurrent queries; otherwise you may need multiple connections too.
First though, I'd see what happens if you only ask the database for the data you need ("SELECT src,time FROMlogsWHERE IP = '" + pair.Key + "' GROUP BY src") and use GetString(0) and GetInt32(1) instead of using the names to look up the src and time; also only get the values once from the result.
I'm also not sure on the logic - you are not ordering the log events by time, so which one is the first returned (and so is stored in the dictionary) could be any of them.
Something like this logic - where each of N threads only operates on the Nth pair, each thread has its own reader, and nothing actually changes allPeople, only the properties of the values in allPeople:
private void RunSubQuery(Dictionary<string, Type> allPeople, MySqlConnection con, int threadNumber, int threadCount)
{
int hoppity = 0; // used to hop over the keys not processed by this thread
foreach (var pair in allPeople)
{
// each of the (threadCount) threads only processes the (threadCount)th key
if ((hoppity % threadCount) == threadNumber)
{
// you may need con per thread, or it might be that you can share con; I don't know
MySqlCommand comd = new MySqlCommand("SELECT src,time FROM `logs` WHERE IP = '" + pair.Key + "' GROUP BY src", con);
using (MySqlDataReader reader = comd.ExecuteReader())
{
var allViews = new Dictionary<string, Dictionary<int, Log>>();
while (reader.Read())
{
string src = reader.GetString(0);
int time = reader.GetInt32(1);
// do whatever to allViews with src and time
}
// no thread will be modifying the same pair.Value, so this is safe
pair.Value.View = allViews;
}
}
++hoppity;
}
}
This isn't tested - I don't have MySQL on this machine, nor do I have your database and the other types you're using. It's also rather procedural (kind of how you would do it in Fortran with OpenMPI) rather than wrapping everything up in task objects.
You could launch threads for this like so:
void RunQuery(Dictionary<string, Type> allPeople, MySqlConnection connection)
{
lock (allPeople)
{
const int threadCount = 8; // the number of threads
// if it takes 18 seconds currently and you're not at .net 4 yet, then you may as well create
// the threads here as any saving of using a pool will not matter against 18 seconds
//
// it could be more efficient to use a pool so that each thread takes a pair off of
// a queue, as doing it this way means that each thread has the same number of pairs to process,
// and some pairs might take longer than others
Thread[] threads = new Thread[threadCount];
for (int threadNumber = 0; threadNumber < threadCount; ++threadNumber)
{
threads[threadNumber] = new Thread(new ThreadStart(() => RunSubQuery(allPeople, connection, threadNumber, threadCount)));
threads[threadNumber].Start();
}
// wait for all threads to finish
for (int threadNumber = 0; threadNumber < threadCount; ++threadNumber)
{
threads[threadNumber].Join();
}
}
}
The extra lock held on allPeople is done so that there is a write barrier after all the threads return; I'm not quite sure if it's needed. Any object would do.
Nothing in this guarantees any performance gain - it might be that the MySQL libraries are single threaded, but the server certainly can handle multiple connections. Measure with various numbers of threads.
If you're using .net 4, then you don't have to mess around creating the threads or skipping the items you aren't working on:
// this time using .net 4 parallel; assumes that connection is thread safe
static void RunQuery(Dictionary<string, Type> allPeople, MySqlConnection connection)
{
Parallel.ForEach(allPeople, pair => RunPairQuery(pair, connection));
}
private static void RunPairQuery(KeyValuePair<string, Type> pair, MySqlConnection connection)
{
MySqlCommand comd = new MySqlCommand("SELECT src,time FROM `logs` WHERE IP = '" + pair.Key + "' GROUP BY src", connection);
using (MySqlDataReader reader = comd.ExecuteReader())
{
var allViews = new Dictionary<string, Dictionary<int, Log>>();
while (reader.Read())
{
string src = reader.GetString(0);
int time = reader.GetInt32(1);
// do whatever to allViews with src and time
}
// no iteration will be modifying the same pair.Value, so this is safe
pair.Value.View = allViews;
}
}
The biggest problem that comes to mind is that you are going to use multithreading to add values to a dictionary, which isn't thread safe.
You'll have to do something like this to make it work, and you might not get that much of a benefit from implementing it this was as it still has to lock the dictionary object to add a value.
Assumptions:
There is a table People in your
database
There are alot of people in
your database
Each database query adds overhead you are doing one db query for each of the people in your database I would suggest it was faster to get all the data back in one query then to make repeated calles
select l.ip,l.time,l.src
from logs l, people p
where l.ip = p.ip
group by l.ip, l.src
Try this with a loop in a single thread, I belive this will be much faster then your existing code.
With in your existing code another thing you can do is to take the creation of the MySqlCommand out of the loop, prepare it in advance and just change the parameter. This should speed up execution of the SQL. see http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/es/connector-net-examples-mysqlcommand.html#connector-net-examples-mysqlcommand-prepare
MySqlCommand comd = new MySqlCommand("SELECT * FROM `logs` WHERE IP = ?key GROUP BY src", con);
comd.prepare();
comd.Parameters.Add("?key","example");
foreach (KeyValuePair<string, Type> pair in allPeople)
{
comd.Parameters[0].Value = pair.Key;
If you are using mutiple threads, each thread will still need there own Command, at lest in MS-SQL this would still be faster even if you recreated and prepared the statment every time, due to the ability for the SQL server to be able to cache the execution plan of a paramertirised statment.
Before you do anything else, find out exactly where the time is being spent. Check the execution plan of the query. The first thing I'd suspect is a missing index on logs.IP.
18 minutes for something like this seems much too long to me. Even if you can cut the execution time in eight by adding more threads (which is unlikely!) you still end up using more than 2 minutes. You could probably read the whole 25k rows into memory in less than five seconds and do the necessary processing in memory...
EDIT: Just to clarify, I'm not advocating actually doing this in memory, just saying that it looks like there's a bigger bottleneck here that can be removed.
I think if you are running this on a multi core machine you could gain benefits from multi threading.
However the way I would approach it is to first look at unblocking the thread you are currently using by making asynchronous database calls. The call backs will execute on background threads, so you will get some multi core benefit there and you won't be blocking threads waiting for the db to come back.
For IO intensive apps like this example sounds like you are likely to see improved throughput depending on what load the db can handle. Assuming the db scales to handle more than one concurrent request you should be good.
Thanks everyone for your help. Currently I am using this
for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++)
{
ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(addDistinctScres, i);
}
ThreadPool to run all the threads. I use the method provided by Pete Kirkham, and I'm creating a new connection per thread.
Times went down to 4 minutes.
Next I'll make something wait for the callback of the threadpool? before performing other functions.
I think the bottleneck now is the MySQL server, because the CPU usage has drops.
#odd parity I thought about that, but the real thing is waaay more than 25k rows. Idk if that'd work.
This sound like the perfect job for map/reduce, i am not a .Net-programmer, but this seems like a reasonable guide:
http://ox.no/posts/minimalistic-mapreduce-in-net-4-0-with-the-new-task-parallel-library-tpl

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