Concurrency

Executing things concurrently and in parallel, using either Grand Central Dispatch or NSOperations

Grand Central Dispatch

The low-level (C) API to handle parallelism and concurrent operation. (Use Operation Queues whenever possible, though)

Executing in Parallel

DispatchQueue.concurrentPerform is a class-level func that takes the amount of iterations, and a block for the work to do. It blocks the calling thread and executes that block as much as possible. It works as an efficient parallel for-loop.

When possible, use a large amount of iteration, so as to use as much of the system as possible.

Concurrency Concerns

Use system trace in instruments to debug concurrency performance.

e.g. too many threads trying to acquire the same lock.

• Look using an unfair lock os_unfair_lock, instead of something like DispatchQueue.sync (which is a fair lock). unfair locks are subject to waiter starvation, whereas fair locks aren’t.
• Look at lock prioritization, make sure that e.g. the main thread isn’t waiting on access to a resource locked by a lower priority thread.

How DispatchQueue.sync works

Given the following lines of code, what happens? What is printed?

let queue = DispatchQueue(label: "myLabel")

print("a")
queue.async { print("1") }
print("b")
queue.async { print("2") }
print("c")
queue.sync { print("3") }
print("d")

So, what happens is that the thread will execute, print a, enqueue the first operation to the queue, print b, enqueue the second operation to the queue, print c, enqueue a placeholder for the third operation and wait until the queue is drained.
Now, some async worker thread comes along and runs the first two operations. (1 and 2 are printed). Then, it transfers ownership of the queue to the calling thread and runs the third operation ( 3 is printed). Finally, the block caused by calling queue.sync is resolved and d is printed.

So, this is what’s printed:

a
b
c
1
2
3
d

Monitoring Events

Use DispatchSource.

Solving the readers-writers problem

The Readers-writers problem is a classic concurrency problem where where you want to allow as many threads as necessary to read a piece of memory, but to block them from reading while the memory is being mutated. Solving this with grand central dispatch is ridiculously easy. You create a concurrent dispatch queue (pass in attributes: .concurrent when you initialize it), and whenever you want to change the value, you use the .barrier work item flag to allow all other access to finish up, block new access to the variable, and finally write to the underlying piece of memory.

For example, this class will manage a piece of threadsafe memory in a performant manner.

import Foundation

class Threadsafe<T> {
    private var _value: T

    private let syncQueue = DispatchQueue(label: "com.rachelbrindle.threadsafe", attributes: .concurrent)

    var value: T {
        get {
            return syncQueue.sync {
                return self._value
            }
        }
        set {
            self.syncQueue.sync(flags: .barrier) {
                self._value = newValue
            }
        }
    }

    init(_ startValue: T) {
        self._value = startValue
    }
}

Operation and OperationQueue

The higher-level (Cocoa) API to handle arranging and executing work. Whenever possible, you should operate on this level, for testability reasons.

Operation

Subclassing

As the docs note, there are four things to override for your asynchronous swift subclass:

• -start()
• isAsynchronous
• isExecuting
• isFinished

And that you must send KVO notifications for the 2 properties (usually isAsynchronous is hardcoded to be true, so sending KVO for that is a non-issue).

Sending KVO means sending -willChangeValue(forKey:), then changing the value, then sending -didChangeValue(forKey:), see the following sample implementation:

class MyAsyncOperation: Operation {
    override func start() {
        self.willChangeValue(forKey: "isExecuting")

        someAsyncWork {
            self.willChangeValue(forKey: "isExecuting")
            self._isExecuting = false
            self.didChangeValue(forKey: "isExecuting")

            self.willChangeValue(forKey: "isFinished")
            self._isFinished = true
            self.didChangeValue(forKey: "isFinished")
        }

        self._isExecuting = true
        self.didChangeValue(forKey: "isExecuting")
    }

    override var isAsynchronous: Bool { return true }

    private var _isExecuting: Bool = false
    override var isExecuting: Bool { return !self.isFinished && self._isExecuting }

    private var _isFinished: Bool = false
    override var isFinished: Bool { return self._isFinished }
}

Last updated: 2020-06-16 11:43:11 -0700