PWork

Welcome to your PWork. A gem to help with the execution of code on parallel threads.

Parallel execution is especially useful at improving performance for long running I/O processes such as database & web service operations.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'pwork'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install pwork

PWork provides the following options for parallel work execution:

PWork now provides an async/await style syntax over a task queue in a similar way to nodejs & c#.

This makes writing/reading asyncronous code much easier and provides performance benefits from thread pooling behind the scenes.

Example:

class UserModel
  include PWork::Async

  def save(user, permissions)
    # save the user data to the database
    async do
      user_repository.set(user)
    end

    # save the permissions data to the database
    async do
      permissions_repository.set(permissions)
    end

    # store the user data in the cache
    async(wait: false) do
      cache.set(cache_key, user)
    end

    # wait for all async tasks issued from this thread to complete
    # (unless the async task specified `wait: false`)
    async :wait
  end
end

The above example shows how you might use the async/wait syntax within a save method of a user model to split the blocking calls of storing the user & permissions data in the database and updating the cache. The example above also shows how the set cache async block can be specified as not requiring wait as the results are not needed in the sync flow.

Using the above async flow if we look at the execution time required for each of the blocking calls:

• user_repository.set # 100ms
• permissions_repository.set # 120ms
• cache.set # 40ms

In a sync flow the save method would take approx 260ms (100+120+40), but via async it should take no more than 120ms.

• PWORK_ASYNC_MODE [String] [Optional] [Default=thread] (thread/fork/test)

This env var is used to specify the mode to use for async tasks.

test mode processes tasks synchronously and is useful for testing.

This is used to define a async task block that should be executed asynchronously within the task pool.

This is used to wait for all async tasks declared from the current thread to complete.

This is used to wait for all async tasks declared from the current object on the current thread to complete.

This is useful to allow async/wait not to interfere with other async calls from within other objects)

This is the number of threads within the async pool to use for processing async tasks

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/sage/pwork. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

This gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT licence.

Copyright (c) 2018 Sage Group Plc. All rights reserved.