Use of Stanford Parser in Web Service - java

I need to use the Stanford Parser in a web service. As SentenceParser loads a big object, I will make sure it is a singleton, but in this case, is it thread safe (no according to http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/parser-faq.shtml). How else would it be done efficiently? One option is locking the object while being used.
Any idea how the people at Stanford are doing this for http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/ ?

If the contention is not a factor, locking (synchronization) would be one option as you mentioned, and it might be good enough.
If there are contentions, however, I see three general options.
(1) instantiating it every time
Just instantiate it as a local variable every time you perform parsing. Local variables are trivially safe. The instantiation is not free of course, but it may be acceptable depending on the specific situation.
(2) using threadlocals
If instantiation turns out to be costly, consider using threadlocals. Each thread would retain its own copy of the parser, and the parser instance would be reused on a given thread. Threadlocals are not without problems, however. Threadlocals may not be garbage collected without being set to null or until the holding thread goes away. So there is a memory concern if there are too many of them. Second, beware of the reuse. If these parsers are stateful, you need to ensure to clean up and restore the initial state so subsequent use of the threadlocal instance does not suffer from the side effect of previous use.
(3) pooling
Pooling is in general no longer recommended, but if the object sizes are truly large so that you need to have a hard limit on the number of instances you can allow, then using an object pool might be the best option.

I don't know how the people at Stanford have implemented their service but I would build such a service based on a message framework, such as http://www.rabbitmq.com/. So your front end service will receive documents and use a message queue to communicate (store documents and retrieve results) with several workers that execute NLP parsing. The workers -- after finishing processing -- will store results into a queue that is consumed by the front end service. This architecture will let you to dynamically add new workers in case of high load. Especially that NLP tagging takes some time - up several seconds per document.

Related

Stream processing architecture

I am in the process of designing a system where there's a main stream of objects and there are multiple workers which produces some result from that object. Finally, there is some special/unique worker (sort of a "sink", in terms of graph theory) which takes all the results, and process them to some final object which is written to some DB.
It is possible for a worker to be dependent on the result of some other workers (hence, waiting for their results)
Now, I'm facing several problems:
It could be that one worker is much slower than another. How do you deal with that? Adding more workers (= scaling) of the slower type? (maybe dynamically)
Suppose W_B is dependent on W_A. If W_B is down for some reason then the flow will stop and the system will stop working. So I'd like the system to bypass this worker, somehow.
Moreover, how do the final worker decide when to operate on the set of results? Suppose it has the results of A and B but lacking the result of C. It may be that C is down or it's just very slow at the moment. How can it make a decision?
It is worth mentioning that it's not a realtime application but rather an offline processing system (i.e. you may access the DB and alter a record), but at the same time, it has to deal with relatively large amount of objects in an "high pace".
Regarding technologies,
I'm developing the system with Java but I'm not bounded to a specific technology.
I'd be glad if you could help me with the general design of the system.
Thanks a lot!
As Peter said, it really depends on the use case. Some general remarks though:
If a worker is slower than the other, maybe create more instances of that type; eg Kubernetes allows dynamic Node creation, and Kafka allows to partition a topic so more than one instance can read off and process it.
If B depends on A and A is down, B can't work and that's it. Maybe restart A? Maybe you can do a regular health check on it.
If the final worker needs the results of A, B and C, how would it process without C being available? If it can, it can store the results of A and B, install a timer, and if that goes off without C having arrived, continue.
Some additional thoughts:
If you mean to say that some subtasks of the overall application are quicker to execute than others, then it can be a good idea to slice up the application so that each worker is doing a bit of everything -- in other words, a share of the quick work and a share of the slow work. But if you mean to say that some machines are slower than others, then you could run fewer workers on the slow machines, and more on the faster ones, so as to balance things so that each worker has roughly the same resources.
You might want to decouple your architecture with some sort of durable queueing between the workers.
It's common to use heartbeats with timeouts and restarts.
Distributed stream processing quickly becomes very complex. Your life will be much easier if you build on top a stream processing framework that provides high availability and exactly-once semantics out of the box.

Should I use ThreadLocal in this high traffic multi-threaded scenario?

Scenario
We are developing an API that will handle around 2-3 million hits per hour in a multi-threaded environment. The server is Apache Tomcat 7.0.64.
We have a custom object with lot of data let's call it XYZDataContext. When a new request comes in we associate XYZDataContext object to the request context. One XYZDataContext object per request. We will be spawning various threads in parallel to serve that request to collect/process data from/into XYZDataContext object. Our threads that will process things in parallel need access to this XYZDataContext object and
to avoid passing around of this object everywhere in the application, to various objects/methods/threads,
we are thinking to make it a threadlocal. Threads will use data from XYZDataContext object and will also update data in this object.
When the thread finishes we are planning to merge the data from the updated XYZDataContext object in the spawned child thread into the main thread's XYZDataContext object.
My questions:
Is this a good approach?
Threadpool risks - Tomcat server will maintain a threadpool and I read that using threadlocal with thread pools is a disaster because thread is not GCed per say and is reused so the references to the threadlocal objects will not get GCed and will result in storing huge objects in memory that we don't need anymore eventually resulting into OutOfMemory issues...
UNLESS they are referenced as weak references so that get GCed immediately.
We're using Java 1.7 open JDK. I saw the source code for ThreadLocal and the although the ThreadLocalMap.Entry is a weakreference it's not associated with a ReferenceQueue, and the comment for Entry constructor says "since reference queues are not used, stale entries are guaranteed to be removed only when the table starts running out of space."
I guess this works great in case of caches but is not the best thing in our case. I would like that the threadlocal XYZDataContext object be GCed immediately. Will the ThreadLocal.remove() method be effective here?
Is there any way to enforce emptying the space in the next GC run?
This is a right scenario to use ThreadLocal objects? Or are we abusing the threadlocal concept and using it where it shouldn't be used?
My gut feeling tells me you're on the wrong path. Since you already have a central context object (one for all threads) and you want to access it from multiple threads at the same time I would go with a Singleton hosting the context object and providing threadsafe methods to access it.
Instead of manipulating multiple properties of your context object, I would strongly suggest to do all manipulations at the same time. Best would be if you pass only one object containing all the properties you want to change in your context object.
e.g
Singleton.getInstance().adjustContext(ContextAdjuster contextAdjuster)
You might also want to consider using a threadsafe queue, filling it up with ContextAdjuster objects from your threads and finally processing it in the Context's thread.
Google for things like Concurrent, Blocking and Nonblocking Queue in Java. I am sure you'll find tons of example code.

Using Java Concurrent Collections in Scala [duplicate]

I have an Actor that - in its very essence - maintains a list of objects. It has three basic operations, an add, update and a remove (where sometimes the remove is called from the add method, but that aside), and works with a single collection. Obviously, that backing list is accessed concurrently, with add and remove calls interleaving each other constantly.
My first version used a ListBuffer, but I read somewhere it's not meant for concurrent access. I haven't gotten concurrent access exceptions, but I did note that finding & removing objects from it does not always work, possibly due to concurrency.
I was halfway rewriting it to use a var List, but removing items from Scala's default immutable List is a bit of a pain - and I doubt it's suitable for concurrent access.
So, basic question: What collection type should I use in a concurrent access situation, and how is it used?
(Perhaps secondary: Is an Actor actually a multithreaded entity, or is that just my wrong conception and does it process messages one at a time in a single thread?)
(Tertiary: In Scala, what collection type is best for inserts and random access (delete / update)?)
Edit: To the kind responders: Excuse my late reply, I'm making a nasty habit out of dumping a question on SO or mailing lists, then moving on to the next problem, forgetting the original one for the moment.
Take a look at the scala.collection.mutable.Synchronized* traits/classes.
The idea is that you mixin the Synchronized traits into regular mutable collections to get synchronized versions of them.
For example:
import scala.collection.mutable._
val syncSet = new HashSet[Int] with SynchronizedSet[Int]
val syncArray = new ArrayBuffer[Int] with SynchronizedBuffer[Int]
You don't need to synchronize the state of the actors. The aim of the actors is to avoid tricky, error prone and hard to debug concurrent programming.
Actor model will ensure that the actor will consume messages one by one and that you will never have two thread consuming message for the same Actor.
Scala's immutable collections are suitable for concurrent usage.
As for actors, a couple of things are guaranteed as explained here the Akka documentation.
the actor send rule: where the send of the message to an actor happens before the receive of the same actor.
the actor subsequent processing rule: where processing of one message happens before processing of the next message by the same actor.
You are not guaranteed that the same thread processes the next message, but you are guaranteed that the current message will finish processing before the next one starts, and also that at any given time, only one thread is executing the receive method.
So that takes care of a given Actor's persistent state. With regard to shared data, the best approach as I understand it is to use immutable data structures and lean on the Actor model as much as possible. That is, "do not communicate by sharing memory; share memory by communicating."
What collection type should I use in a concurrent access situation, and how is it used?
See #hbatista's answer.
Is an Actor actually a multithreaded entity, or is that just my wrong conception and does it process messages one at a time in a single thread
The second (though the thread on which messages are processed may change, so don't store anything in thread-local data). That's how the actor can maintain invariants on its state.

Pool of threads tied to resources on the server

I have a Java servlet that operates with a heavy-weight and thread-unsafe resource to handle user requests. The resource is an object that needs a long time to be instantiated (up to 10 seconds) and takes a large amount of memory.
But when the object is allocated, it takes a short time to run its method I need to process a request.
There can be several such resources, different from each other.
Each request comes with an ID, which points out on the certain resource.
I wish to implement a pool of such resources, so that requests with the same IDs will not instantiate a new object, but will pick one from the pool.
The scheme is following:
after the request has been received, servlet checks whether a resource with the requested ID is in the pool
if not, servlet creates one and provides it
if the resource is already instantiated, the request goes into a queue to be executed, doPost waits for it.
The operation over different resources must be concurrent, but synchronized within the same resource.
I am new to multithreading in Java, and the ThreadPoolExecutor does not seem to be usable as is, so I would be appreciated for an advice how to implement the above described scheme. Thanks.
You are correct - ThreadPoolExecutor is not what you want. It is simply a pool of threads to run tasks with, not a shared resource collection.
What you want is a cache. It needs to create a resource and return it to requesting threads to use, and reuse the things it returned previously. Also, the resource returned must be thread-safe (So if your underlying resources are not, you may need to write synchronized wrappers for them).
There are a number of thread-safe caches around, quite a few of them - opensource. Try those out, it shouldn't be too difficult to configure them for your use case (it seems fairly typical).
It is possible and not too difficult to implement a make-shift cache of your own, but you're far better off using a third-party solution if you are new to multithreading.

Is it bad practise to utilize many threads? (through SwingWorkers)

My Java (Swing) application creates a new SwingWorker object when it needs to (e.g) download data from the Internet and do something at the same time (think display a loader). However, monitoring the threads created, this can quickly reach ~100 threads.
Is this bad practice? If yes; what's the proper way to do it? Doesn't the GC automatically clean up unused threads?
Yes it is a bad practice when you put no upper bound on the number of threads (or generally resources).
In this case you better use a thread pool which contains at most a specific number of threads (say for example 25). You can either create them all at startup, or create them lazily on demand.
Implement a simple request manager system for the pool, which gives to the requesters the resources (or in case of running out of resources, queues them or simply denies them).
In this way, cleaning them in the end will also be easy and obvious.

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