Concurrency Best Practices + Tests

Le 5 sept. 2019 à 10:27, Karsten Kusche <[hidden email]> a écrit :

Precisely my thinking! try to avoid concurrency as much as possible and if you _really_ have to use it, try a queue approach. 

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Am 5. September 2019 um 09:34:25, Tim Mackinnon ([hidden email]) schrieb:

Not to sound flippant - but do everything you can to limit where you use concurrency (and if possible, not at all). It adds lots of complication that often isn’t necessary.

Where you do need it, queue results or commands and then have workers to process those - workers, queues and commands put you back into easily testable territory.

Then you are left with the concurrent bit - hopefully now quite tiny and specific, which you you can normally blast and test if you have concurrency hole - but in the realms of can it queue things up in an orderly fashion and dequeue them as well. Deep code inspection on this is also helpful (albeit manual).

Tim

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On 4 Sep 2019, at 14:55, John M McIntosh <[hidden email]> wrote:

This was useful in doing our single threaded JavaScript to Multi-threaded Swift IOS platform code http://reactivex.io

....

John M. McIntosh. Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd https://www.linkedin.com/in/smalltalk

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On Wed, Sep 4, 2019 at 15:32, N. Bouraqadi <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi everyone,

Can I get your input on the following questions :

- What are your best practices and recommendations for developing and testing concurrent software?

- How to discover need for synchronization/critical sections/ when doing TDD?

- How to write code to avoid dead-locks?

Thanks for your help,
Noury
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On 6 Sep 2019, at 02:32, Andres Valloud <[hidden email]> wrote:

TL; DR: generally, developing a good sense of what to do ***before
writing a single line of code*** works really well.

On 9/4/19 6:32 , N. Bouraqadi wrote:

Hi everyone,

Can I get your input on the following questions :

- What are your best practices and recommendations for developing and testing concurrent software?

- How to discover need for synchronization/critical sections/ when doing TDD?

- How to write code to avoid dead-locks?

Thanks for your help,
Noury
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On 7 Sep 2019, at 18:42, James Foster <[hidden email]> wrote:

The point of noury is what is the way to approach concurrency when doing TDD.

Now how to build reliable ….

I won’t pretend to answer such a broad question with anything definitive, but I’d start my investigation of concurrency with a look at databases. One of the primary features of any multi-user database (not just GemStone!) is that transactions are in practice concurrent but the system is designed to apply them as if they were serial and in a way where order does not matter. So I would attempt to identify the concurrent tasks and verify that they each got the result that they would have obtained had they been applied in various serial fashions.

Imagine that DrTDD should be extended to support concurrent programming. 

Then this is the question that we want to get answer. 

I would look for a way to pass a set of repeatable tasks to DrTDD and let the testing framework run them in various orders then run them concurrently with interrupts and switching contexts. 

James

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On Sep 10, 2019, at 9:41 AM, Ron Teitelbaum <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Noury,

I didn't respond because I really didn't think I had much to add but I've been thinking about what I would want to have in a concurrent system.  This may be obvious but

Concurrent systems promise either speed or scalability.  The goal will change the requirements.  We know that for speed there are two aspects to consider.  You can only go as fast as it takes for your largest component to process and limited resources means that going really fast on easy to process components of the problem set will only lead to a large backlog and coordination issues.

For scalability you need to ensure completeness.  You can't just send stuff off and assume it will get processed.  There is a lot to do to ensure that the everything that fails or is delayed is rescheduled to prevent a major backup.

Both of these goals, it would seem to me, would be helped considerably by a system that can explain itself. Depending on the size of the processing task this could get tricky.  Something that processes millions of messages a second would need to have a much more sophisticated system to gather information without changing the efficiency of the system itself.  Something that is less time intensive could process and keep this information with the processed results.

What I would want to know is time to process all of the components compared to time to process the full solution. I would also want to know about errors, rescheduling, wait times. Ultimately the best concurrent system will run at time to run slowest component + coordination time.  If the system is not running at that speed we would like to have information as to why.  Is there a backup, deadlock or other errors, resource issues or something else that is causing the system to delay.  Comparing the processing time of the full process and the processing time of each component could tell you a lot about where things are going wrong (maybe your process tree is wrong, or your scheduling is too aggressive causing rescheduling on a regular basis or 2 times the processing time of a component because expected data wasn't available).  If this is a huge system then you can't really keep all that information but you could keep averages instead.  

The idea is probably not that novel but having a system that could explain itself, what it is doing, and how well it is performing, could be a very good debugging tool. I would be very careful to build it such that it doesn't change the processing efficiency of the production system and that the explanation system is optional (I know they don't really go together [optional and no effect] which makes this very difficult).  That also means that I wouldn't try to use this reporting system to automatically change the system itself. 

Hope that helps.

All the best,

Ron Teitelbaum
Chief Executive Officer
3D Immersive Collaboration Consulting, LLC
[hidden email]
www.3dicc.com

  

On Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 9:52 AM Nowak, Helge <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear Noury,

 

I didn’t had the time to do a thorough web search. You certainly did. I found several references that look very promising. Mny of them were concerning Java and OS threads. Othes are about Erlang (https://mariachris.github.io/Pubs/ERLANG-2011.pdf ). I think not only the concurrency problem but also the base technology matters. I couldn’t find anything about Smalltalk yet. So you are probably conquering new land.

 

Here is a quote from the preface of “Test Driven Development: By Example” from 2003 by Kent Beck: “There certainly are programming tasks that can’t be driven solely by tests (or, at least not yet). Security and concurrency, for example, are two topics where TDD is insufficient to mechanically demonstrate that the goals of the software has been met.” “Subtle concurrency problems can’t be reliably duplicated by running the code.”

 

Good luck! I am looking forward to your findings.

 

Helge

 

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From: Esug-list <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Noury Bouraqadi
Sent: Tuesday, 10 September 2019 15:12
To: Members ESUG <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [Esug-list] [SPAM] Re: Concurrency Best Practices + Tests

 

Thanks you all  for your answers.

 

Best,

Noury

On 7 Sep 2019, at 18:42, James Foster <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

The point of noury is what is the way to approach concurrency when doing TDD.

Now how to build reliable ….

 

I won’t pretend to answer such a broad question with anything definitive, but I’d start my investigation of concurrency with a look at databases. One of the primary features of any multi-user database (not just GemStone!) is that transactions are in practice concurrent but the system is designed to apply them as if they were serial and in a way where order does not matter. So I would attempt to identify the concurrent tasks and verify that they each got the result that they would have obtained had they been applied in various serial fashions.

 

Imagine that DrTDD should be extended to support concurrent programming. 

Then this is the question that we want to get answer. 

 

I would look for a way to pass a set of repeatable tasks to DrTDD and let the testing framework run them in various orders then run them concurrently with interrupts and switching contexts. 

 

James

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