Re: multithreaded cache?
On 5/18/2012 5:45 PM, Robert Klemme wrote:
On 18.05.2012 20:42, Silvio Bierman wrote:
On 05/17/2012 11:54 AM, Robert Klemme wrote:
I provide a variant of Silvio's, Eric's and Daniel's solution which
should yield higher throughput because it works without read write
locking. You can find it as gist in case the code is garbled in the
newsgroup posting:
https://gist.github.com/2717818
I think you have as many locks as I suggested (being one)? My initial
implementations of something like this used a plain map with an extra
lock but later cases used the by then available ConcurrentHashMap as
well, making one lock redundant.
You didn't show it here, did you? I can's seem to find it in the thread.
Note that CHM does also do synchronization. I am not sure from your
statement what exact locking scheme you apply. There does seem to be one
difference though: I my version the second lock goes away after the
value has been computed so there is only the sync of CHM left.
It seems to me that if N threads query the same key at about
the same time, they may all miss the map and go off to perform
the slow computation. If "slow" is large compared to the cost of
a lock-release pair (and if it weren't, why cache?), the tradeoff
seems suspect.
Also, different threads may wind up using different value
instances. If the cache is purely a convenience for a value-only
object that may be all right, but it's not all right if the values
are supposed to be singletons.
Finally, there's more than a whiff of the double-checked locking
antipattern about what you're doing with the `here' flag. I'm not
absolutely sure what you've got is in fact DCL (hence, wrong), but
I'm also not absolutely sure it's DCL-free. Before using the pattern
in any important way, I'd want to check with a major-league guru,
just as "due diligence."
--
Eric Sosman
esosman@ieee-dot-org.invalid