On Sep 14, 2011, at 8:00 PM, Dave Zarzycki wrote:

> Dispatch queues exist to solve both the synchronous and asynchronous 
> producer/consumer pattern. If you want the producer to wait until the 
> consumer is done, then use dispatch_sync() instead of dispatch_async():
> 
>       x = create_something();
>       dispatch_sync(consumer_q, ^{
>               do_something_with(x);
>       });
>       // do_something_with() is done
> 
> That's it. Easy, huh? :-)
Yes, sure :) 

But - unless I miss something - I can't use that - or better I can't use this 
*directly* with my consumer (see previous post). That is, when the consumer 
finishes processing one data buffer, it needs to keep its state - through being 
blocked in its "get_me_more_data" method.
The consumer's state (it's a parser) is the function stack. So, I need an 
intermediate actor - which is capable to hand off one data object. This is some 
kind of queue.

> 
> A note about dispatch semaphores: While they are powerful, they are not meant 
> to replace queues. They exist for two very specific problems: 1) Refactoring 
> synchronous APIs on top of asynchronous APIs and

> 2) managing finite resource pools.
This (2) is actually what I'm trying to accomplish (well, a bit more - 
performance for example). Otherwise, I would just safe the 100Mbyte data 
download on my iPhone in memory  ;)

A synchronous queue, would have capacity zero -- which would block producers 
till a consumer takes the data. This is what I want. Otherwise, if I would 
asynchronously queue the NSData objects, somehow, NSURLConnection would flood a 
iPhone with almost 1Mbyte per sec, that is a few seconds before crash.

So, unless the parser is capable to truly parse partial content, and can return 
and restart while it's state is kept somewhere else, I can't see how to make it 
"easy" in conjunction with a NSURLConnection :)


So, the questions remains: would the use of a "Synchronous Queue" be effective 
enough? What are the consequences?

Andreas


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