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Batch acquire: take up to N tasks per call across non-empty queues

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#49 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
python, redis

Research direction

Read threadmill/backends/redis.py and acquire.lua first, then trace WorkerProcess and WorkerThread to understand the current per-thread acquire flow. Define how fetch-and-dispatch handles lease timing, graceful shutdown, and prefetched tasks, while keeping pop and move in one script call. Done means up to N tasks can be acquired across non-empty queues without stranded or prematurely failed work.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Split out of #48 during the fair multi-queue scheduling change (codingjoe-fair-multi-queue-scheduling).

defer: Batch acquire (fetch up to N tasks per call across non-empty queues). Needs executor fetch-and-dispatch; the lease would tick while tasks wait in-process. [threadmill/backends/redis.py]

Why

acquire() pops a single task per script call, so a process with --threads 4 performs four Redis round trips to fill its threads. A batch acquire that spreads up to N tasks across the non-empty queues would cut round trips and drain several queues in parallel.

What makes it non-trivial

  • WorkerProcess runs one WorkerThread per thread, each calling acquire() itself. A batch would need a fetch-and-dispatch step, since a single thread cannot execute N tasks at once.
  • acquire.lua moves the task into the running set with deadline = now + lease_ttl. Tasks prefetched into an in-process queue would burn lease budget while waiting, so the reaper could fail them, or the lease clock has to start at execution instead.
  • Graceful shutdown must return prefetched, unstarted tasks to the ready set instead of leaving them to be reaped as FAILED.

Pop and move must stay inside one script call.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
12
Forks
1
Avg merge
19h 11m
Merged PRs (30d)
12

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