What's it all about, Alfie?

I was having a bit of a problem with The Broker today, it seemed. It appeared that when I saved my state to the Broker's configuration service, I was hanging, and the monitoring thread that fired off this save was hung. I got the guys to restart the Broker and things seemed OK, but I decided to take advantage of one of the really neat things of boost threads, and fire off the call in a separate thread so if it stalls, the monitoring thread doesn't.

The old code looks like this:

  if (secs - mLastMessageSaved >= 300) {
    saveMessagesToConfigSvc();
    mLastMessageSaved = secs;
  }

becomes:

  if (secs - mLastMessageSaved >= 300) {
    using namespace boost;
    thread   go = thread(&TickerPlant::saveMessagesToConfigSvc(), this);
    mLastMessageSaved = secs;
  }

and now the call to saveMessagesToConfigSvc() is now called by the separate thread, and as soon as the method returns, the thread is killed and cleaned up. Exceedingly sweet!

OK... this is what boost threads are all about, but in comparison to Java threads, or something that takes a little more scaffolding, this is elegant to the extreme. Just add a few constructs to the line and it's done. You can't get much simpler than that. Very nice.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 14th, 2011 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Coding, Cube Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.