multiple threads in web applications?

[christappan]

I've searched documentation and the forum and am getting partial and sometimes conflicting answers about what's possible with the AA app server.

I am running a python file to push some data from an AA application to another system and process the response. It's working if I loop through the requests I need to send, but I need a way to do this for bulk requests so that it performs more quickly.

Is multi-threading possible on the Application Server? If so, does anyone have sample code to help me understand how it works differently than looping?

Thanks in advance.

[kkfin]

Re: multiple threads in web applications?

What comes to server performance you can check your servers performance tab. So application server supports multi-threads.

But I suppose you are actually asking does xbasic support multi-threading in web application. Currently not. You can test it with loop.

[christappan]

Re: multiple threads in web applications?

thanks Kenneth.

Actually I'm running this application from IIS so I don't think the same settings are present...

Yes I'm looking for the latter answer. I want 30 api calls to happen simultaneously instead of 1 by 1 in a loop.

That's disappointing but I guess I'll survive and/or look for ways to do it outside Alpha.

Actually, what would happen if I called a javascript function to loop through records in a list and do ajax callbacks on individual records? That would theoretically run them simultaneously, yes?

[RichCPT]

Re: multiple threads in web applications?

I'm guessing you found the xbasic object you can use for making XHR API calls (not sure i have the right terminology here), but when using the object you have to wait for a response or timeout before using the object again.
What about creating a queue or array of say 10 of these objects and dividing up the api calls between them. When all the objects are busy, you'd have to pause for a while. I think you'd want a separate desktop Alpha application, so you don't burden your actual web application server.

[Selwyn Rabins]

Re: multiple threads in web applications?

I've searched documentation and the forum and am getting partial and sometimes conflicting answers about what's possible with the AA app server.

I am running a python file to push some data from an AA application to another system and process the response. It's working if I loop through the requests I need to send, but I need a way to do this for bulk requests so that it performs more quickly.

Is multi-threading possible on the Application Server? If so, does anyone have sample code to help me understand how it works differently than looping?

Thanks in advance.

The answer is unfortunately more complicated than you would like (an probably also based on an incomplete understanding of what you are trying to do), but nevertheless, I will try to provide an answer:
Xbasic does support multiple threads, but if you write multi-threaded Xbasic in code that handles an Ajax response it will likely be detrimental to the server performance.
So we recommend that you do not do this.

What we do recommend is something like this

a) you have an Ajax callback that executes an Xbasic function.
b) your Xbasic function then invokes some code written in another languages (could be some .net code, a Node.js script, Python, etc).
c) Xbasic will block while this other code executes.
d) If this other code executes efficiently (i.e. maybe it makes uses of multiple threads), then the amount of time that Xbasic is blocking is minimized.

So instead of having your Python code return to Xbasic and having Xbasic continue to process data, do all of the work in Python and then only return to Xbasic when the task is complete.


This is the technique we use internally in the Alpha Server. For example, in the case of reports that reference images on S3, we have a very efficient piece of code written in C that downloads the report images from s3 to local files. it does this by spawning multiple threads. Xbasic blocks while this is happening and then once the images are all downloaded, the report is printed.