How can I prevent the parent from blocking when writing to a child?

Question

Recently I had a problem using (pipe |-) when I wanted to communicate between two processes. Basically, the child process couldn't process STDIN as fast as it was filled up by parent. This caused parent to wait until STDIN was free and made it run slow.

How big can STDIN be and is it possible to modify it. If yes, what is the best practice size?

Here is some code sample to show what I mean:

if ($child_pid = open($child, "|-"))
{
    $child->autoflush(1);

    # PARENT process
    while (1)
    {

             # Read packet from socket save in $packet
             process_packet($packet);

             # forward packet to child
             print $child $packet;
     }
}
else
{
     die "Cannot fork: $!" unless defined $child_pid;
     # CHILD process
     my $line;  

     while($line = <STDIN>)
     {
         chomp $line;
         another_process_packet($line);
     }
}

In this sample another_process_packet slower than process_packet. The reason I write the code like this is, I want to use same data comes from socket and actually get it once.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can of course buffer in the parent process, and only write to the child when the child's fd is writable (i.e., writing won't block). You can do this yourself with the right args to syswrite, or use an event loop:

use AnyEvent;
use AnyEvent::Handle;

# make child, assume you write to it via $fh

my $done = AnyEvent->condvar;
my $h = AnyEvent::Handle->new( fh => $fh );

while( you do stuff ){
    my $data = ...;
    $h->push_write($data); # this will never block
}

$h->on_drain(sub { $done->send });
$done->wait; # now you block, waiting for all writes to actually complete

Edit: This used to be untested, but I tested it, and it works. (I used perl -ne "sleep 1; print $_" as the slow child.) Writes proceed during the while loop, if possible, but never block the loop. At the end, you actually block until all the writes have completed.

My test scripts are on gist.github: http://gist.github.com/126488

You can see how the child blocks the blocking loop, but how it doesn't block the non-blocking loop. Obvious when you put it that way ;)

(Finally, as a general rule of thumb; if you are interacting with the network or with other processes, you should probably be using an event loop.)

Answer 2

The size is set in the kernel. You can either recompile the kernel with a higher limit or use an intermediary buffer process.

Answer 3

Process handle contains a member function named 'blocking'. Just set the blocking to 0, and the parent process will not be blocked.

if ($child_pid = open($child, "|-"))
{
    $child->blocking(0);    # Key to the solution.
    $child->autoflush(1);

    # PARENT process
    while (1)
    {

             # Read packet from socket save in $packet
             process_packet($packet);

             # forward packet to child
             print $child $packet;
     }
}
else
{
     die "Cannot fork: $!" unless defined $child_pid;
     # CHILD process
     my $line;  

     while($line = <STDIN>)
     {
         chomp $line;
         another_process_packet($line);
     }
}