Suppose we were to implement a network application, such as a chat with a central server and several clients: we assume that all communication must go through the central server, then it should pick up messages from some clients and forward them to target clients, and so on.
Regardless of the technology used (sockets, web services, etc..), it is possible to think that there are some producer threads (that generate messages) and some consumer threads (that read messages).
For example, you could use a single queue for incoming and outgoing messages, but using a single queue, you couldn’t receive and send messages simultaneously, because only one thread at a time can access the queue.
Perhaps it would be more appropriate to use two queues: for example, this article explains a way in which you can manage a double queue so that producers and consumers can work almost simultaneously. This scenario may be fine if there are only a producer and a consumer, but if there are many clients:
- How to make so that the central server can receive data simultaneously from multiple input streams?
- How to make so that the central server can send data simultaneously to multiple output streams?
To resolve this problem, my idea is to use a double queue for each client: on the central server, each client connection may be associated with two queues, one for incoming messages from that client and one for outgoing messages addressed to that client. In this way the central server may send and receive data simultaneously on almost all the connections with the clients…
There are probably other ways to manage the queues … What are the parameters to determine how many queues are needed and how to organize them? There are cases that do not need any queue?
To me, this idea of using a queue per client or multiple queues per client seems to miss the point. First of all, it is absolutely possible to build a queue which can be accessed simultaneously by 2 threads (one can be enqueueing an item while a different one is dequeueing another item). If you want to know how, post a specific question about that.
Second, even if we assume that only 1 thread at a time can access a single queue, and even if we assume that the server will be receiving or sending data to/from all the clients simultaneously, it still doesn’t follow that you need a different queue for each client. To avoid limiting system performance, you just need to allow enough concurrency to utilize all the server’s CPUs. Even with a single, system-wide queue, if dequeueing/enqueueing messages is fast enough compared to the other work the server is doing, it might not be a bottleneck. (And with an efficient implementation, simply inserting an item or removing an item from a queue should be very fast. It’s a very simple operation.) For that message queue to become the bottleneck limiting performance, either you would need a LOT of CPUs, or everything else the server was doing would have to be very fast. In that case, you could work out some scheme with 2 or 4 system-wide queues, to allow 2x or 4x more concurrency.
The whole idea of using work queues in a multi-threaded system is that they 1) allow multiple consumers to all grab work from a single location, so producers can “dump” whatever work they need done at that single location without worrying about which consumer will do it, and 2) function as a load-balancing mechanism for the consumers. (Additionally, a work queue can act as a “buffer” if producers temporarily generate work too fast for the consumers.) If you have a dedicated pair of producer-consumer threads for each client, it calls into question why you need to use queues at all. Why not just do a synchronous “pass off” from dedicated producer to corresponding dedicated consumer? Or, why not use a single thread per client which acts as both producer and consumer? Using queues in the way which you are proposing doesn’t seem to really gain anything.