I need to implement a statistics reporter - an object that prints to screen bunch of statistic.
This info is updated by 20 threads.
The reporter must be a thread itself that wakes up every 1 sec, read the info and prints it to screen.
My design so far: InfoReporterElement - one element of info. has two function, PrintInfo and UpdateData.
InfoReporterRow - one row on screen. A row holds vector of ReporterInfoElement.
InfoReporterModule - a module composed of a header and vector of rows.
InfoRporter - the reporter composed of a vector of modules and a header. The reporter exports the function 'PrintData' that goes over all modules\rows\basic elements and prints the data to screen.
I think that I should an Object responsible to receive updates from the threads and update the basic info elements.
The main problem is how to update the info - should I use one mutex for the object or use mutex per basic element?
Also, which object should be a threads - the reporter itself, or the one that received updates from the threads?
I would say that first of all, the Reporter itself should be a thread. It's basic in term of decoupling to isolate the drawing part from the active code (MVC).
The structure itself is of little use here. When you reason in term of Multithread it's not so much the structure as the flow of information that you should check.
Here you have 20 active threads that will update the information, and 1 passive thread that will display it.
The problem here is that you encounter the risk of introducing some delay in the work to be done because the active thread cannot acquire the lock (used for display). Reporting (or logging) should never block (or as little as possible).
I propose to introduce an intermediate structure (and thread), to separate the GUI and the work: a queuing thread.
active threads post event to the queue
the queuing thread update the structure above
the displaying thread shows the current state
You can avoid some synchronization issues by using the same idea that is used for Graphics. Use 2 buffers: the current one (that is displayed by the displaying thread) and the next one (updated by the queuing thread). When the queuing thread has processed a batch of events (up to you to decide what a batch is), it asks to swap the 2 buffers, so that next time the displaying thread will display fresh info.
Note: On a more personal note, I don't like your structure. The working thread has to know exactly where on the screen the element it should update is displayed, this is a clear breach of encapsulation.
Once again, look up MVC.
And since I am neck deep in patterns: look up Observer too ;)
The main problem is how to update the
info - should i use one mutex for the
object or use mutex per basic element?
Put a mutex around the basic unit of update action. If this is an InfoReporterElement object, you'd need a mutex per such object. Otherwise, if a row is updated at a time, by any one of the threads then put the mutex around the row and so on.
Also, which object should be a threads
- the reporter itself, or the one that received updates from the threads?
You can put all of them in separate threads -- multiple writer threads that update the information and one reader thread that reads the value.
You seem to have a pretty good grasp of the basics of concurrency.
My intial thought would be a queue which has a mutex which locks for writes and deletes. If you have the time then I would look at lock-free access.
For you second concern I would have just one reader thread.
A piece of code would be nice to operate on.
Attach a mutex to every InfoReporterElement. As you've written in a comment, not only you need getting and setting element value, but also increment it or probably do another stuff, so what I'd do is make a mutexed member function for every interlocked operation I'd need.
Related
I have encountered the need to use multithreading in my windows form GUI application using C++. From my research on the topic it seems background worker threads are the way to go for my purposes. According to example code I have
System::Void backgroundWorker1_DoWork(System::Object^ sender, System::ComponentModel::DoWorkEventArgs^ e)
{
BackgroundWorker^ worker = dynamic_cast<BackgroundWorker^>(sender);
e->Result = SomeCPUHungryFunction( safe_cast<Int32>(e->Argument), worker, e );
}
However there are a few things I need to get straight and figure out
Will a background worker thread make my multithreading life easier?
Why do I need e->Result?
What are the arguments passed into the backgroundWorker1_DoWork function for?
What is the purpose of the parameter safe_cast(e->Argument)?
What things should I do in my CPUHungryFunction()?
What if my CPUHungryFunction() has a while loop that loops indefinitely?
Do I have control over the processor time my worker thread gets?
Can more specifically control the number of times the loop loops within a set period? I don’t want to be using up cpu looping 1000s of times a second when I only need to loop 30 times a second.
*Is it necessary to control the rate at which the GUI is updated?
Will a background worker thread make my multithreading life easier?
Yes, very much so. It helps you deal with the fact that you cannot update the UI from a worker thread. Particularly the ProgressChanged event lets you show progress and the RunWorkerCompleted event lets you use the results of the worker thread to update the UI without you having to deal with the cross-threading problem.
Why do I need e->Result?
To pass back the result of the work you did to the UI thread. You get the value back in your RunWorkerCompleted event handler, e->Result property. From which you then update the UI with the result.
What are the arguments passed into the function for?
To tell the worker thread what to do, it is optional. Otherwise identical to passing arguments to any method, just more awkward since you don't get to chose the arguments. You typically pass some kind of value from your UI for example, use a little helper class if you need to pass more than one. Always favor this over trying to obtain UI values in the worker, that's very troublesome.
What things should I do in my CPUHungryFunction()?
Burn CPU cycles of course. Or in general do something that takes a long time, like a dbase query. Which doesn't burn CPU cycles but takes too long to allow the UI thread to go dead while waiting for the result. Roughly, whenever you need to do something that takes more than a second then you should execute it on a worker thread instead of the UI thread.
What if my CPUHungryFunction() has a while loop that loops indefinitely?
Then your worker never completes and never produces a result. This may be useful but it isn't common. You would not typically use a BGW for this, just a regular Thread that has its IsBackground property set to true.
Do I have control over the processor time my worker thread gets?
You have some by artificially slowing it down by calling Thread.Sleep(). This is not a common thing to do, the point of starting a worker thread is to do work. A thread that sleeps is using an expensive resource in a non-productive way.
Can more specifically control the number of times the loop loops within a set period? I don’t want to be using up cpu looping 1000s of times a second when I only need to loop 30 times a second.
Same as above, you'd have to sleep. Do so by executing the loop 30 times and then sleep for a second.
Is it necessary to control the rate at which the GUI is updated?
Yes, that's very important. ReportProgress() can be a fire-hose, generating many thousands of UI updates per second. You can easily get into a problem with this when the UI thread just can't keep up with that rate. You'll notice, the UI thread stops taking care of its regular duties, like painting the UI and responding to input. Because it keeps having to deal with another invoke request to run the ProgressChanged event handler. The side-effect is that the UI looks frozen, you've got the exact problem back you were trying to solve with a worker. It isn't actually frozen, it just looks that way, it is still running the event handler. But your user won't see the difference.
The one thing to keep in mind is that ReportProgress() only needs to keep human eyes happy. Which cannot see updates that happen more frequently than 20 times per second. Beyond that, it just turns into an unreadable blur. So don't waste time on UI updates that just are not useful anyway. You'll automatically also avoid the fire-hose problem. Tuning the update rate is something you have to program, it isn't built into BGW.
I will try to answer you question by question
Yes
DoWork is a void method (and need to be so). Also DoWork executes
in a different thread from the calling one, so you need to have a
way to return something to the calling thread. The e->Result
parameter will be passed to the RunWorkerCompleted event inside
the RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs
The sender argument is the backgroundworker itself that you can use
to raise events for the UI thread, the DoWorkEventArgs eventually
contains parameters passed from the calling thread (the one who has
called RunWorkerAsync(Object))
Whatever you have need to do. Paying attention to the userinterface
elements that are not accessible from the DoWork thread. Usually, one
calculate the percentage of work done and update the UI (a progress
bar or something alike) and call ReportProgress to communicate with
the UI thread. (Need to have WorkerReportProgress property set to
True)
Nothing runs indefinitely. You can always unplug the cord.
Seriously, it is just another thread, the OS takes care of it and
destroys everything when your app ends.
Not sure what do you mean with this, but it is probably related
to the next question
You can use the Thread.Sleep or Thread.Join methods to release the
CPU time after one loop. The exact timing to sleep should be fine
tuned depending on what you are doing, the workload of the current
system and the raw speed of your processor
Please refer to MSDN docs on BackgroundWorker and Thread classes
I'm somehow stuck with implementing a reporting functionailty in my Log-Parser Application.
This is what I did so far:
I'm writing an Application that reads Logfiles and searches the strings for multiple regular Expressions that can be defined in a user-configuration file. For every so called "StringPipe"-defintion that is parsed from the configuration the Main-Process spawns a worker thread that will search for a single regex. The more definitons the user creates, the more worker threads are spawned. The Main Function reads a bunch of Logstrings and then sends the workers to process the strings and so on.
Now I want every single worker thread that is spawned to report information about the number of matches it has found, how long it took, what it did with those strings and so on. These Information are used to export as csv, write to DB and so on.
Now I'm stuck at the point where I created a Class "Report". This Class provides member functions that are called by the worker threads to make the Report-Class gather the Infos needed for generating the report.
For that my workers (which are boost::threads / functors) have to create a Report-Object which they can call those reporting functions for.
The problem is in my Design, because when a worker-thread finishes his job, it is destroyed and for the next bunch of strings that needs to be processed a new instance of this worker functor is spawned and so it needs to create a new Report Object.
This is a problem from my understanding, because I need some kind of container where every worker can store it's reported infos into and finally a global report that contains such infos as how long the whole processing has taken, which worker was slowest and so on.
I just need to collect all these infos together, but how can I do this? Everytime a worker stops, reports, and then starts again, it will destroy the Report-Object and it's members, so all the infos from previous work is gone.
How can I solve this problem or how is such a thing handled in general?
First, I would not spawn a new thread do the RE searching and such. Rather, you almost certainly want a pool of threads to handle the jobs as they arise.
As far as retrieving and processing the results go, it sounds like what you want are Futures. The basic idea is that you create an object to hold the result of the computation, and a Future to keep track of when the computation is complete. You can either wait for the results to be complete, or register a call-back to be called when a future is complete.
Instead of having the worker thread create the report object, why don't you have the main thread create the empty report and pass a pointer to the worker thread when created. Then the worker thread can report back when it has completed the report, then the main thread can add the data from that report to some main report.
So, the worker thread will never have ownership of the actual report, it fill just populate its data fields and report back to the main thread.
I am new to multithreading and have designed a program that receives data from two microcontroller measuring various temperatures (Ambient and Water) and draws the data to the screen. Right now the program is singly threaded and its performance SUCKS A BIG ONE.
I get basic design approaches with multithreading but not well enough to create a thread to do a task but what I don't get is how to get threads to perform seperate task and place the data into a shared data pool. I figured that I need to make a queue that has one consumer and multiple producers (would like to use std::queue). I have seen some code on the gtkmm threading docs that show a single Con/Pro queue and they would lock the queue object produce data and signal the sleeping thread that it is finished then the producer would sleep. For what I need would I need to sleep a thread, would there be data conflicts if i didn't sleep any of the threads, and would sleeping a thread cause a data signifcant data delay (I need realtime data to be drawn 30 frames a sec)
How would I go about coding such a queue using the gtkmm/glibmm library.
Here's a suggestion:
1. Have two threads, that are responsible for obtaining data and placing into a buffer. Each thread has it's own (circular) buffer.
2. There will be a third thread that is responsible for getting data from the buffers and displaying on the screen.
3. The screen thread sends messages to the data threads requesting some data, then displays the data. The messages help synchronize execution and avoid dead-locks.
4. None of the threads should "wait on single or multiple objects", but poll for events.
Think of this scenario using people. One person is delivering water temperature readings. Another person delivering ambient temperature readings. A third person receives or asks for the data and displays the data (on a white board). The objective is to keep everybody operating at maximum efficiency without any collisions.
If you're looking for a lock free implementation of this, you won't find one. When data structures are being written to, something needs to keep two threads from simultaneously updating the data structure and corrupting it.
Is there any reason you can't have each thread collect on it's own, with it's own structure, and then combine the results at the end?
I'm having trouble keeping my app responsive to user actions. Therefore, I'd like to split message processing between multiple threads.
Can I simply create several threads, reading from the same message queue in all of them, and letting which ever one is able process each message?
If so, how can this be accomplished?
If not, can you suggest another way of resolving this problem?
You cannot have more than one thread which interacts with the message pump or any UI elements. That way lies madness.
If there are long processing tasks which can be farmed out to worker threads, you can do it that way, but you'll have to use another thread-safe queue to manage them.
If this were later in the future, I would say use the Asynchronous Agents APIs (plug for what I'm working on) in the yet to be released Visual Studio 2010 however what I would say given todays tools is to separate the work, specifically in your message passing pump you want to do as little work as possible to identify the message and pass it along to another thread which will process the work (hopefully there isn't Thread Local information that is needed). Passing it along to another thread means inserting it into a thread safe queue of some sort either locked or lock-free and then setting an event that other threads can watch to pull items from the queue (or just pull them directly). You can look at using a 'work stealing queue' with a thread pool for efficiency.
This will accomplish getting the work off the UI thread, to have the UI thread do additional work (like painting the results of that work) you need to generate a windows message to wake up the UI thread and check for the results, an easy way to do this is to have another 'work ready' queue of work objects to execute on the UI thread. imagine an queue that looks like this: threadsafe_queue<function<void(void)> basically you can check if it to see if it is non-empty on the UI thread, and if there are work items then you can execute them inline. You'll want the work objects to be as short lived as possible and preferably not do any blocking at all.
Another technique that can help if you are still seeing jerky movement responsiveness is to either ensure that you're thread callback isn't executing longer that 16ms and that you aren't taking any locks or doing any sort of I/O on the UI thread. There's a series of tools that can help identify these operations, the most freely available is the 'windows performance toolkit'.
Create the separate thread when processing the long operation i.e. keep it simple, the issue is with some code you are running that is taking too long, that's the code that should have a separate thread.
I'm programming an online game for two reasons, one to familiarize myself with server/client requests in a realtime environment (as opposed to something like a typical web browser, which is not realtime) and to actually get my hands wet in that area, so I can proceed to actually properly design one.
Anywho, I'm doing this in C++, and I've been using winsock to handle my basic, basic network tests. I obviously want to use a framelimiter and have 3D going and all of that at some point, and my main issue is that when I do a send() or receive(), the program kindly idles there and waits for a response. That would lead to maybe 8 fps on even the best internet connection.
So the obvious solution to me is to take the networking code out of the main process and start it up in its own thread. Ideally, I would call a "send" in my main process which would pass the networking thread a pointer to the message, and then periodically (every frame) check to see if the networking thread had received the reply, or timed out, or what have you. In a perfect world, I would actually have 2 or more networking threads running simultaneously, so that I could say run a chat window and do a background download of a piece of armor and still allow the player to run around all at once.
The bulk of my problem is that this is a new thing to me. I understand the concept of threading, but I can see some serious issues, like what happens if two threads try to read/write the same memory address at the same time, etc. I know that there are already methods in place to handle this sort of thing, so I'm looking for suggestions on the best way to implement something like this. Basically, I need thread A to be able to start a process in thread B by sending a chunk of data, poll thread B's status, and then receive the reply, also as a chunk of data., ideally without any major crashing going on. ^_^ I'll worry about what that data actually contains and how to handle dropped packets, etc later, I just need to get that happening first.
Thanks for any help/advice.
PS: Just thought about this, may make the question simpler. Is there a way to use the windows event handling system to my advantage? Like, would it be possible to have thread A initialize data somewhere, then trigger an event in thread B to have it pick up the data, and vice versa for thread B to tell thread A it was done? That would probably solve a lot of my problems, since I don't really need both threads to be able to work on the data at the same time, more of a baton pass really. I just don't know if this is possible between two different threads. (I know one thread can create its own messages for the event handler.)
The easiest thing
for you to do, would be to simply invoke the windows API QueueUserWorkItem. All you have to specify is the function that the thread will execute and the input passed to it. A thread pool will be automatically created for you and the jobs executed in it. New threads will be created as and when is required.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms684957(VS.85).aspx
More Control
You could have a more detailed control using another set of API's which can again manage the thread pool for you -
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms686980(VS.85).aspx
Do it yourself
If you want to control all aspects of your thread creation and the pool management you would have to create the threads yourself, decide how they should end , how many to create etc (beginthreadex is the api you should be using to create threads. If you use MFC you should use AfxBeginThread function).
Send jobs to worker threads - Io completion Ports
In this case, you would also have to worry about how to communicate your jobs - i would recommend IoCOmpletionPorts to do that. It is the most scalable notification mechanism that i currently know of made for this purpose. It has the additional advantage that it is implemented in the kernel so you avoid all kinds of dead loack sitautions you would encounter if you decide to handroll something yourself.
This article will show you how with code samples -
http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2004/03/29/101329.aspx
Communicate Back - Windows Messages
You could use windows messages to communicate the status back to your parent thread since it is doing the message wait anyway. use the PostMessage function to do this. (and check for errors)
ps : You could also allocate the data that needs to be sent out on a dedicated pointer and then the worker thread could take care of deleting it after sending it out. That way you avoid the return pointer traffic too.
BlodBath's suggestion of non-blocking sockets is potentially the right approach.
If you're trying to avoid using a multithreaded approach, then you could investigate the use of setting up overlapped I/O on your sockets. They will not block when you do a transmit or receive, but have the added bonus of giving you the option of waiting for multiple events within your single event loop. When your transmit has finished, you will receive an event. (see this for some details)
This is not incompatible with a multithreaded approach, so there's the option of changing your mind later. ;-)
On the design of your multithreaded app. the best thing to do is to work out all of the external activities that you want to be alerted to. For example, so far in your question you've listed network transmits, network receives, and user activity.
Depending on the number of concurrent connections you're going to be dealing with you'll probably find it conceptually simpler to have a thread per socket (assuming small numbers of sockets), where each thread is responsible for all of the processing for that socket.
Then you can implement some form of messaging system between your threads as RC suggested.
Arrange your system so that when a message is sent to a particular thread and event is also sent. Your threads can then be sent to sleep waiting for one of those events. (as well as any other stimulus - like socket events, user events etc.)
You're quite right that you need to be careful of situations where more than one thread is trying to access the same piece of memory. Mutexes and semaphores are the things to use there.
Also be aware of the limitations that your gui has when it comes to multithreading.
Some discussion on the subject can be found in this question.
But the abbreviated version is that most (and Windows is one of these) GUIs don't allow multiple threads to perform GUI operations simultaneously. To get around this problem you can make use of the message pump in your application, by sending custom messages to your gui thread to get it to perform gui operations.
I suggest looking into non-blocking sockets for the quick fix. Using non-blocking sockets send() and recv() do not block, and using the select() function you can get any waiting data every frame.
See it as a producer-consumer problem: when receiving, your network communication thread is the producer whereas the UI thread is the consumer. When sending, it's just the opposite. Implement a simple buffer class which gives you methods like push and pop (pop should be blocking for the network thread and non-blocking for the UI thread).
Rather than using the Windows event system, I would prefer something that is more portable, for example Boost condition variables.
I don't code games, but I've used a system similar to what pukku suggested. It lends nicely to doing things like having the buffer prioritize your messages to be processed if you have such a need.
I think of them as mailboxes per thread. You want to send a packet? Have the ProcessThread create a "thread message" with the payload to go on the wire and "send" it to the NetworkThread (i.e. push it on the NetworkThread's queue/mailbox and signal the condition variable of the NetworkThread so he'll wake up and pull it off). When the NetworkThread receives the response, package it up in a thread message and send it back to the ProcessThread in the same manner. Difference is the ProcessThread won't be blocked on a condition variable, just polling on mailbox.empty( ) when you want to check for the response.
You may want to push and pop directly, but a more convenient way for larger projects is to implement a toThreadName, fromThreadName scheme in a ThreadMsg base class, and a Post Office that threads register their Mailbox with. The PostOffice then has a send(ThreadMsg*); function that gets/pushes the messages to the appropriate Mailbox based on the to and from. Mailbox (the buffer/queue class) contains the ThreadMsg* = receiveMessage(), basically popping it off the underlying queue.
Depending on your needs, you could have ThreadMsg contain a virtual function process(..) that could be overridden accordingly in derived classes, or just have an ordinary ThreadMessage class with a to, from members and a getPayload( ) function to get back the raw data and deal with it directly in the ProcessThread.
Hope this helps.
Some topics you might be interested in:
mutex: A mutex allows you to lock access to specific resources for one thread only
semaphore: A way to determine how many users a certain resource still has (=how many threads are accessing it) and a way for threads to access a resource. A mutex is a special case of a semaphore.
critical section: a mutex-protected piece of code (street with only one lane) that can only be travelled by one thread at a time.
message queue: a way of distributing messages in a centralized queue
inter-process communication (IPC) - a way of threads and processes to communicate with each other through named pipes, shared memory and many other ways (it's more of a concept than a special technique)
All topics in bold print can be easily looked up on a search engine.