Question

Closely related to this question: How to use HttpClient with multithreaded operation?, I’m wondering if apache HttpAsyncClient is thread safe, or if it, too, requires the use of a MultiThreadedHttpConnectionManager, or a ThreadSafeClientConnManager.

If it does require such a connection manager, does one exist in the async libraries?

I was able to find a PoolingClientAsyncConnectionManager in the async libraries, but I’m not sure if that’s what I need.

Alternately, I was thinking of using ThreadLocal to create one HttpAsyncClient object per thread.

Note that unlike the question I referenced earlier, I need state to be independent across sessions, even if multiple sessions hit the same domain. If a cookie is set in session 1, the cookie should not be visible to session 2. For this reason, I’ve also considered creating a brand new HttpAsyncClient object for every single request, though I get the impression there should be a better way.

Thanks.

Answer 1

After load testing both with and without the PoolingClientAsyncConnectionManager, we discovered that we got inconsistent results when we did not use the PoolingClientAsyncConnectionManager.

Amongst other things, we tracked the number of Http calls we were making, and the number of Http calls that were completed (either through the cancelled(…), completed(…), or failed(…) functions of the associated FutureCallback). Without the PoolingClientAsyncConnectionManager, and under heavy load, the two figures sometimes did not match up, leading us to believe that somewhere, some connections were stomping on connection information from other threads (just a guess).

Either way, with the PoolingClientAsyncConnectionManager, the figures always matched, and the load tests were all successful, so we are definitely using it.

The final code we used goes like this:

public class RequestProcessor {
  private RequestProcessor instance = new RequestProcessor();
  private PoolingClientAsyncConnectionManager pcm = null;
  private HttpAsyncClient httpAsyncClient = null;
  private RequestProcessor() {
    // Initialize the PoolingClientAsyncConnectionManager, and the HttpAsyncClient 
  }
  public void process(...) {
    this.httpAsyncClient.execute(httpMethod, 
         new BasicHttpContext(), // Use a separate HttpContext for each request so information is not shared between requests
         new FutureCallback<HttpResponse>() {
      @Override
      public void cancelled() {
        // Do stuff
      }
      @Override
      public void completed(HttpResponse httpResponse) {
        // Do stuff
      }
      @Override
      public void failed(Exception e) {
        // Do stuff
      }
    });
  }
}