使用等待条件的生产者和消费者

The Producer and Consumer using Wait Conditions example shows how to use QWaitCondition and QMutex to control access to a circular buffer shared by a producer thread and a consumer thread.

生产者把数据写入缓冲直到达到缓冲末端为止，此时它从头重新开始，覆盖现有数据。消费者线程读取产生数据并将其写入标准错误。

相比单独采用互斥，等待条件使之拥有更高级的并发成为可能。若对缓冲区的访问仅仅被守卫通过 QMutex ，消费者线程与生产者线程无法同时访问缓冲。然而，没有坏处让 2 线程操控 不同部分 的缓冲在同一时间。

范例包含 2 个类： Producer and Consumer 。两者继承自 QThread 。在这 2 个类之间进行通信所使用的循环缓冲和保护它的同步工具都是全局变量。

替代使用 QWaitCondition and QMutex 以解决生产者-消费者问题是使用 QSemaphore . This is what the 使用信号量的生产者和消费者 example does.

全局变量

让我们从审查循环缓冲和关联同步工具开始：

constexpr int DataSize = 100000;
constexpr int BufferSize = 8192;
QMutex mutex; // protects the buffer and the counter
char buffer[BufferSize];
int numUsedBytes;
QWaitCondition bufferNotEmpty;
QWaitCondition bufferNotFull;

DataSize is the amount of data that the producer will generate. To keep the example as simple as possible, we make it a constant. BufferSize is the size of the circular buffer. It is less than DataSize , meaning that at some point the producer will reach the end of the buffer and restart from the beginning.

To synchronize the producer and the consumer, we need two wait conditions and one mutex. The bufferNotEmpty condition is signalled when the producer has generated some data, telling the consumer that it can start reading it. The bufferNotFull condition is signalled when the consumer has read some data, telling the producer that it can generate more. The numUsedBytes is the number of bytes in the buffer that contain data.

Together, the wait conditions, the mutex, and the numUsedBytes counter ensure that the producer is never more than BufferSize bytes ahead of the consumer, and that the consumer never reads data that the producer hasn't generated yet.

Producer (生产者) 类

让我们审查代码为 Producer 类：

class Producer : public QThread
{
public:
    explicit Producer(QObject *parent = nullptr)
        : QThread(parent)
    {
    }
private:
    void run() override
    {
        for (int i = 0; i < DataSize; ++i) {
            {
                const QMutexLocker locker(&mutex);
                while (numUsedBytes == BufferSize)
                    bufferNotFull.wait(&mutex);
            }
            buffer[i % BufferSize] = "ACGT"[QRandomGenerator::global()->bounded(4)];
            {
                const QMutexLocker locker(&mutex);
                ++numUsedBytes;
                bufferNotEmpty.wakeAll();
            }
        }
    }
};

生产者生成 DataSize bytes of data. Before it writes a byte to the circular buffer, it must first check whether the buffer is full (i.e., numUsedBytes 等于 BufferSize ). If the buffer is full, the thread waits on the bufferNotFull 条件。

At the end, the producer increments numUsedBytes and signalls that the condition bufferNotEmpty is true, since numUsedBytes is necessarily greater than 0.

We guard all accesses to the numUsedBytes variable with a mutex. In addition, the QWaitCondition::wait () function accepts a mutex as its argument. This mutex is unlocked before the thread is put to sleep and locked when the thread wakes up. Furthermore, the transition from the locked state to the wait state is atomic, to prevent race conditions from occurring.

Consumer (消费者) 类

让我们转到 Consumer 类：

class Consumer : public QThread
{
public:
    explicit Consumer(QObject *parent = nullptr)
        : QThread(parent)
    {
    }
private:
    void run() override
    {
        for (int i = 0; i < DataSize; ++i) {
            {
                const QMutexLocker locker(&mutex);
                while (numUsedBytes == 0)
                    bufferNotEmpty.wait(&mutex);
            }
            fprintf(stderr, "%c", buffer[i % BufferSize]);
            {
                const QMutexLocker locker(&mutex);
                --numUsedBytes;
                bufferNotFull.wakeAll();
            }
        }
        fprintf(stderr, "\n");
    }
};

The code is very similar to the producer. Before we read the byte, we check whether the buffer is empty ( numUsedBytes is 0) instead of whether it's full and wait on the bufferNotEmpty condition if it's empty. After we've read the byte, we decrement numUsedBytes (instead of incrementing it), and we signal the bufferNotFull condition (instead of the bufferNotEmpty condition).

main() 函数

在 main() ，我们创建 2 线程并调用 QThread::wait () 以确保 2 线程在退出之前都有时间完成：

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    QCoreApplication app(argc, argv);
    Producer producer;
    Consumer consumer;
    producer.start();
    consumer.start();
    producer.wait();
    consumer.wait();
    return 0;
}

So what happens when we run the program? Initially, the producer thread is the only one that can do anything; the consumer is blocked waiting for the bufferNotEmpty condition to be signalled ( numUsedBytes is 0). Once the producer has put one byte in the buffer, numUsedBytes is strictly greater than 0, and the bufferNotEmpty condition is signalled. At that point, two things can happen: Either the consumer thread takes over and reads that byte, or the producer gets to produce a second byte.

The producer-consumer model presented in this example makes it possible to write highly concurrent multithreaded applications. On a multiprocessor machine, the program is potentially up to twice as fast as the equivalent mutex-based program, since the two threads can be active at the same time on different parts of the buffer.

Be aware though that these benefits aren't always realized. Locking and unlocking a QMutex has a cost. In practice, it would probably be worthwhile to divide the buffer into chunks and to operate on chunks instead of individual bytes. The buffer size is also a parameter that must be selected carefully, based on experimentation.

范例工程 @ code.qt.io