----- Original Message -----
From: "Juan Hernandez" <jhernand(a)redhat.com>
To: engine-devel(a)ovirt.org
Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2012 6:06:30 PM
Subject: [Engine-devel] ThreadPoolUtil with 500 threads and no queue?
Hello all,
What is the reasoning behind the decision to have a pool with a
maximum
of 500 threads and no job queue (see ThreadPoolUtil.java)? Wouldn't
it
make more sense to have a much smaller thread pool and a potentially
large queue of jobs?
Regards,
Juan Hernandez
There are three general strategies for queuing:
1) Direct handoffs. A good default choice for a work queue is a SynchronousQueue that
hands off tasks to threads without otherwise holding them. Here, an attempt to queue a
task will fail if no threads are immediately available to run it, so a new thread will be
constructed. This policy avoids lockups when handling sets of requests that might have
internal dependencies. Direct handoffs generally require unbounded maximumPoolSizes to
avoid rejection of new submitted tasks. This in turn admits the possibility of unbounded
thread growth when commands continue to arrive on average faster than they can be
processed.
2) Unbounded queues. Using an unbounded queue (for example a LinkedBlockingQueue without
a predefined capacity) will cause new tasks to wait in the queue when all corePoolSize
threads are busy. Thus, no more than corePoolSize threads will ever be created. (And the
value of the maximumPoolSize therefore doesn't have any effect.) This may be
appropriate when each task is completely independent of others, so tasks cannot affect
each others execution; for example, in a web page server. While this style of queuing can
be useful in smoothing out transient bursts of requests, it admits the possibility of
unbounded work queue growth when commands continue to arrive on average faster than they
can be processed.
3) Bounded queues. A bounded queue (for example, an ArrayBlockingQueue) helps prevent
resource exhaustion when used with finite maximumPoolSizes, but can be more difficult to
tune and control. Queue sizes and maximum pool sizes may be traded off for each other:
Using large queues and small pools minimizes CPU usage, OS resources, and
context-switching overhead, but can lead to artificially low throughput. If tasks
frequently block (for example if they are I/O bound), a system may be able to schedule
time for more threads than you otherwise allow. Use of small queues generally requires
larger pool sizes, which keeps CPUs busier but may encounter unacceptable scheduling
overhead, which also decreases throughput.
Why not? we are using 1).
Actually 500 threads should be enough for very big applications