Monday 6 July 2015

Dynamic thread pool

Sometimes we're facing the problem, that we need to solve using dynamic thread pool.

By 'dynamic' I mean, that the pool is shrinking and growing automatically but it does have upper bound (so it can't grow indefinitely).

The API of the pool would be quite simple:

We should be able to submit the task to be executed asynchronously and monitor number of threads in the pool.
Having control over maximum number of threads and their longevity would be another feature.

Let's try to document functional requirements in the form of unit tests.
That would be our test setup:
Initial number of threads should be zero:
The execution of the tasks should be done concurrently:
Number of threads should grow automatically:
The size of thread pool should shrink when there is no active tasks and keep alive time was exceeded:
If the number of submitted task is greater than maximum threads number, we should block:
Actual implementation is quite simple, we need to use ThreadPoolExecutor:
There are two important things here.
First, we are required to create our own RejectedExecutionHandler to support blocking when the maximum number is exceed.
Secondly, we need to use the blocking queue of size zero (in our case I chose SynchronousQueue) - the queue needs to be filled up before we can create more than initial number of threads (in our case zero).
The whole project can be found at github.

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