Aim and Progress

2008-06-06

Aim and Progress

Permalink 12:36:09, Categories: Thread Communication  

For this first entry I'll quickly go over what I'm aiming to achieve and then fill you in on what I've got done so far.

The idea is to provide an easy to use method to run member functions inside threads.
There's got to be some central management providing a queue, access methods and the framework to create the right number of threads.
There's got to be some base class to inherit from, to provide the methods needed to interact with the management.

As as test case I'm working with csLoader, with a goal to give CS some multi-threaded loading capabilities.

I've committed my test ideas to supplement this entry, so you can see exactly what I'm experimenting with at the moment.
You can see this here: http://crystal.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/crystal?view=rev&revision=29857

threadmanager.h/cpp:

In these files I've provided a singleton based thread manager. This is pretty small and simple, it combines processor detection with a ThreadedJobQueue, giving a globally accessible threadsafe queue with 'cpu/core count' number of worker threads. The only publicly visible method to interact with this queue is to enqueue jobs to it. Each 'job' is in the form of a ThreadEvent.

threadevent.h:

Here I have three things;
A macro for queueing an event.
The ThreadedCallable class which is to be inherited by classes which are to be threaded.
The ThreadEvent class which is the 'job' package containing all the information needed for the method call.

The macro simply creates a new ThreadEvent (filling it with the given information) and adds it to the global thread queue.

The ThreadedCallable class contains two methods:
GetThreadedCallable() - This is to simply query the ThreadedCallable type.
RunMethod(); - This needs to be implemented by the inheriting class. When this method is executed it should find the correct method to run based on the methodIndex and extract the arguments for this method from the args array.

The ThreadEvent class contains the object who's method should be called, the methodIndex which represents which method is to be called and the args array, which contains a copy of all the arguments to that method. When a thread pops this off the queue, it will execute the Run() method, which in turn will call the RunMethod() of the appropriate object, which will then call the desired method and call that, passing the contents of args to it.

So at the moment this is a simple callback system. I've tested it out with two methods of csLoader and it works fairly well. There are currently issues with calling multiple methods of csLoader at the same time (in some cases), which I'll deal with in future once I've finalised the system. I'm not ecstatic with how it works right now, it doesn't seem as developer-friendly as it could be (or as fast). But it's a possible implementation that I'd be content with if nothing better is found.

On the csLoader side of things, you can see that I've added on a threaded loader object. I'm unsure if this is the best way to go about it, or if I should make it an SCF query-able object (so people can do csQueryRegistry for iThreadedLoader, instead of querying for iLoader and calling GetThreadedLoader() as it is now). The way I do it now is kind of nice because technically they are the same system, the threaded bit is just a small extension. I'll need some feedback on the 'correct' way to do this.

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