CODEWITHSUNDEEP
multithreadingdesign-patternsmemory-management
Tarun Gehlaut
Tarun Gehlaut

Reputation: 1342

Consumer-producer: Pausing the consumer if memory usage goes beyond a particular threshold

I have a situation where my main thread (producer) allocates a huge chunk of memory on heap for a task, does some work on that buffer and then provides the buffer to worker threads (consumers) for further processing(which will first compress that data and then write it to disk). Once the worker thread is done with it's job, it releases memory that was acquired by the producer for the task.

However there can be a situation where my main thread allocates too much of memory and thus my system starts swapping out other programs to disk to accommodate the memory requirement. Since the disk becomes busy the worker threads find it difficult to write on disk (and eventually free any memory) and meanwhile the producers continues to allocate more memory for other tasks. This in the end kills my system's performance.

What can be a good design for this problem?

Additionally, if pausing the main thread by pre-computing the memory requirement, in advance, is an option how can I come to a reliable number?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 92

Answers (1)

bobah
bobah

Reputation: 18864

Possible design options

  • single-producer-multiple-consumers blocking queue between producer and workers
  • atomic task inboxes to each worker in the pull and producer round-robining tasks among them and busy-spinning/blocking when unable to post (I think Herb Sutter features this design in one of his concurrency lectures)

Memory allocation-wise it is always beneficial to be deterministic, even as deterministic as pre-allocating everything on startup. It is just not always possible or practical to be that strict, so usually a combination of fixed/dynamic sizing and startup/runtime allocation takes place in any non-trivial system.

Upvotes: 0

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