Adding the Bulk push()/pop() Methods to BKit Queues
Today I was helping out a developer refactor his code so that it would be more CPU intensive for a shorter time as opposed to "tailing off" as it ran. The problem is this: his app needed to read a large amount of data (30,000 to 50,000 records) per file for several files. But not all files had the same length. This meant that his original design where h file processor was a thread, had the limitation that as some threads finished, 'less' of the machine was dedicated to the task. He wanted to fix that.
The easiest way to fix that is to have all processing go through a single queue - as opposed to a queue per file. This is not without it's limitations, however, as now this queue will become the bottleneck as synchronization on it to push() and pop() items will be under contention by all threads. The refactoring had a few issues, but the real problem remained - the queue operations needed to be done in bulk.
So, I added the ability to push a Collection of objects onto each queue (LIFO and FIFO), as well as popping off a bunch of values (up to a provided limit). This is the only way to achieve balance between the processing threads and the locking on the queue. The end result is that he now has another parameter to tune - the batch size of the pops. If it's 50 to 100 he should be in fine shape and not have to worry about performance hits due to excessive locking contention, but I'll let him fiddle with that and find the optimal value for his process.