Data Concurrency - Producer Consumer Thread

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Producer / Consumer is concurrency model (ie two threads/process communication) where:

• one thread called a Producer sends data
• and the other thread called the Consumer receive data.

The data send and received is called a message.

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Pipeline

When the consumer becomes also a producer for another consumer, they form a chain called a pipeline.

See also Event - Provider

Upstream faster than downstream

What solutions do we have when there is a fast producer and a slow consumer (ie if the upstream is faster, than the downstream)

• Backpressure - the slower consumer request a given amount of data from the faster producer
• Buffer the messages in a queue
  • One consumer: as buffers have limited capacity, the application will run out of memory sooner or later.
  • Start another consumers in parallel that will consume the same buffer. see Parallel Programming - Producer Consumer problem (Bounded-buffer problem)
• Drop some message - networking hardware does that
• Block the producer until the consumer catch up. It slows down the entire pipeline.