Re: Multithreading in Ruby

On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 6:46 PM, Nabs Kahn <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Hi, I'm relatively new to ruby and threading in general. I'm trying to
> get the following code to work. Essentially, the program scrapes data
> from a site which has a list of urls on the first page (and more list
> pages can be accessed by hitting next) and each url in the list needs to
> be followed as well.
>
> So what I would like to do is create 5 concurrent threads: Thread 1
> would download the list page as a Mechanize page object and queue it,
> hit next and download the next page as a Mechanize page object and queue
> it, etc. Thread 2 would take the queue from Thread 1 and start to
> extract the required data, i.e. the urls and queue them into a new
> queue. Thread 3 would take the queue from Thread 2 and download the page
> each url points to and save it as a Mechanize page object and queue it
> into another queue. Thread 4 would take the queue from Thread 3 and
> extract the necessary data, format it and queue it into yet another
> queue. And finally, Thread 5 will take the queue from Thread 4 and write
> the data to a file.
>
> At least, that is in theory... So I wrote the following program, however
> only the first Thread seems to be queueing and the rest don't work.
> Please let me know if I'm missing something.
>
> =A0rank_pages_queue =3D Queue.new
> =A0items_queue =3D Queue.new
> =A0item_pages_queue =3D Queue.new
> =A0finished_items_queue =3D Queue.new
>
> =A0mech_page =3D get_page(url)
> =A0rank_page_download =3D Thread.new do
> =A0 =A0while mech_page
> =A0 =A0 =A0rank_pages_queue << mech_page
> =A0 =A0 =A0mech_page =3D hit_next(mech_page)
> =A0 =A0end
> =A0end
>
> =A0rank_page_extract =3D Thread.new do
> =A0 =A0while rank_pages_download.alive?
> =A0 =A0 =A0rank_page =3D rank_pages_queue.pop
> =A0 =A0 =A0items_queue << get_rank_name_url(rank_page)
> =A0 =A0end
> =A0end
>
> =A0item_page_download =3D Thread.new do
> =A0 =A0while rank_page_extract.alive?
> =A0 =A0 =A0items =3D items_queue.pop
> =A0 =A0 =A0items.each do |item_arr|
> =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0item_pages_queue << [item_arr, get_page(item_arr[2])]
> =A0 =A0 =A0end
> =A0 =A0end
>
> Thanks in advance. And I'm running Ruby 1.8.7 on Snow Leopard.
>
> --
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
>
>

I'm not really sure what your problem is, but I see an issue and
something that I'd do differently. If you are experiencing that the
program ends without anything done, it's because you need to wait for
the threads to complete. You can do that with the join method, or the
value method, if you need a return value from the thread. Also, I
think there's something wrong with your logic of calling alive?. It
can happen that the thread is still alive but it will not enqueue
anything else because it's finished already. If this happens, that
thread will block in the call to queue.pop forever. A better
alternative is to queue a special object which will signal the
consumer that it has to finish. Something like:

require 'thread'

def process
 sleep(rand)
end

queue =3D Queue.new

puts "creating first"
first =3D Thread.new do
  ["work", "more work", "yet some more", :finish].each do |work|
  	puts "first thread is processing..."
  	process
  	puts "queuing #{work}"
  	queue << work
  end
end
puts "creating second"
second =3D Thread.new do
  while (work =3D queue.pop) !=3D :finish
    puts "got #{work} to do. processing it..."
    process
  end
end

first.join
second.join
puts "finished"


$ ruby queues.rb
creating first
first thread is processing...
creating second
queuing work
got work to do. processing it...
first thread is processing...
queuing more work
got more work to do. processing it...
first thread is processing...
queuing yet some more
first thread is processing...
queuing finish
got yet some more to do. processing it...
finished

In this little example, I used the symbol :finish to signal that the
other thread should finish and not wait for anything else in the
queue. You can use any other thing you want. For example, if the
consumer can receive any arbitrary object, I've seen people enqueue
the actual queue object to signal the end. In my example a symbol was
enough and a simple solution. Also note how I joined the two threads
at the end, to avoid the main thread exiting the program before the
threads are finished. I also added a little process method that sleeps
a random amount of time, to simulate the actual work.

Hope this helps,

Jesus.