Thank you for your time. I'll try to explain it. I hope I can clear it up.

First of it, I made a meaning mistake between asynchronous and non-blocking. This implementation uses a non-blocking algorithm internally while providing a blocking-like algorithm on the surface. It is single-threaded and not multi-threaded where one thread fetches data and blocks waiting and the other accumulates it and provides to whichever wants it.

Second of it, I had made a mistake of going after BufferedReader instead of going after BufferedInputStream. If you want me to go after BufferedReader it's ok but I only thought that going after BufferedInputStream would be more generically useful than BufferedReaderwhen I started the poc.

*On to my code:*

*Short answers:*

1. The sleep(int) exists because I don't know how to wait until more
   data exists in the buffer which is part of read()'s contract.
2. The |ByteBuffer| gives a buffer that is filled by the OS (what I
   believe Channels do) instead of getting data only by demand (what I
   believe Streams do).

*Full answers:*

The blockingFill(boolean) method is a method for a busy wait for a fill which is used exclusively by the read() method. All other methods use the version that does not sleep (fill(boolean)). blockingFill(boolean)'s existance like that is only because the read() method must not return unless either:

1. The stream ended.
2. The next byte is ready for reading.

Additionally, statistically, that while loop will rarely evaluate to true as reads are in chunks so readPos will be behind writePos most of the time. I have no idea if an interrupt will ever happen, to be honest. The main reasons why I'm using a sleep is because I didn't want a hog onto the CPU in a full thread usage busy wait and because I didn't find any way of doing a thread sleep in order to wake up later when the buffer managed by native code has more data.

The Non-blocking part is managed by the buffer the OS keeps filling most if not all the time. That buffer is the field

|ByteBuffer readBuffer|

That's the gaining part against the plain old Buffered classes.


Did that make sense to you? Feel free to ask anything else you need.


On 25/10/2016 20:52, Pavel Rappo wrote:
I've skimmed through the code and I'm not sure I can see any asynchronicity
(you were pointing at the lack of it in BufferedReader).
And the mechanics of this is very puzzling to me, to be honest:
     void blockingFill(boolean forced) throws IOException {
         fill(forced);
         while (readPos == writePos) {
             try {
                 Thread.sleep(100);
             } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                 // An interrupt may mean more data is available
             }
             fill(forced);
         }
     }
I thought you were suggesting that we should utilize the tools which OS provides
more efficiently. Instead we have something that looks very similarly to a
"busy loop" and... also who and when is supposed to interrupt Thread.sleep()?
Sorry, I'm not following. Could you please explain how this is supposed to work?
On 24 Oct 2016, at 15:59, Brunoais <brunoa...@gmail.com> wrote:
Attached and sending!
On 24/10/2016 13:48, Pavel Rappo wrote:
Could you please send a new email on this list with the source attached as a
text file?
On 23 Oct 2016, at 19:14, Brunoais <brunoa...@gmail.com> wrote:
Here's my poc/prototype:
http://pastebin.com/WRpYWDJF
I've implemented the bare minimum of the class that follows the same contract 
of BufferedReader while signaling all issues I think it may have or has in 
comments.
I also wrote some javadoc to help guiding through the class.
I could have used more fields from BufferedReader but the names were so 
minimalistic that were confusing me. I intent to change them before sending 
this to openJDK.
One of the major problems this has is long overflowing. It is major because it 
is hidden, it will be extremely rare and it takes a really long time to 
reproduce. There are different ways of dealing with it. From just documenting 
to actually making code that works with it.
I built a simple test code for it to have some ideas about performance and 
correctness.
http://pastebin.com/eh6LFgwT
This doesn't do a through test if it is actually working correctly but I see no 
reason for it not working correctly after fixing the 2 bugs that test found.
I'll also leave here some conclusions about speed and resource consumption I 
found.
I made tests with default buffer sizes, 5000B  15_000B and 500_000B. I noticed 
that, with my hardware, with the 1 530 000 000B file, I was getting around:
In all buffers and fake work: 10~15s speed improvement ( from 90% HDD speed to 
100% HDD speed)
In all buffers and no fake work: 1~2s speed improvement ( from 90% HDD speed to 
100% HDD speed)
Changing the buffer size was giving different reading speeds but both were 
quite equal in how much they would change when changing the buffer size.
Finally, I could always confirm that I/O was always the slowest thing while 
this code was running.
For the ones wondering about the file size; it is both to avoid OS cache and to 
make the reading at the main use-case these objects are for (large streams of 
bytes).
@Pavel, are you open for discussion now ;)? Need anything else?
On 21/10/2016 19:21, Pavel Rappo wrote:
Just to append to my previous email. BufferedReader wraps any Reader out there.
Not specifically FileReader. While you're talking about the case of effective
reading from a file.
I guess there's one existing possibility to provide exactly what you need (as I
understand it) under this method:
/**
  * Opens a file for reading, returning a {@code BufferedReader} to read text
  * from the file in an efficient manner...
    ...
  */
java.nio.file.Files#newBufferedReader(java.nio.file.Path)
It can return _anything_ as long as it is a BufferedReader. We can do it, but it
needs to be investigated not only for your favorite OS but for other OSes as
well. Feel free to prototype this and we can discuss it on the list later.
Thanks,
-Pavel
On 21 Oct 2016, at 18:56, Brunoais <brunoa...@gmail.com> wrote:
Pavel is right.
In reality, I was expecting such BufferedReader to use only a single buffer and 
have that Buffer being filled asynchronously, not in a different Thread.
Additionally, I don't have the intention of having a larger buffer than before 
unless stated through the API (the constructor).
In my idea, internally, it is supposed to use 
java.nio.channels.AsynchronousFileChannel or equivalent.
It does not prevent having two buffers and I do not intent to change 
BufferedReader itself. I'd do an BufferedAsyncReader of sorts (any name 
suggestion is welcome as I'm an awful namer).
On 21/10/2016 18:38, Roger Riggs wrote:
Hi Pavel,
I think Brunoais asking for a double buffering scheme in which the 
implementation of
BufferReader fills (a second buffer) in parallel with the application reading 
from the 1st buffer
and managing the swaps and async reads transparently.
It would not change the API but would change the interactions between the 
buffered reader
and the underlying stream.  It would also increase memory requirements and 
processing
by introducing or using a separate thread and the necessary synchronization.
Though I think the formal interface semantics could be maintained, I have doubts
about compatibility and its unintended consequences on existing subclasses,
applications and libraries.
$.02, Roger
On 10/21/16 1:22 PM, Pavel Rappo wrote:
Off the top of my head, I would say it's not possible to change the design of an
_extensible_ type that has been out there for 20 or so years. All these I/O
streams from java.io were designed for simple synchronous use case.
It's not that their design is flawed in some way, it's that they doesn't seem to
suit your needs. Have you considered using 
java.nio.channels.AsynchronousFileChannel
in your applications?
-Pavel
On 21 Oct 2016, at 17:08, Brunoais <brunoa...@gmail.com> wrote:
Any feedback on this? I'm really interested in implementing such 
BufferedReader/BufferedStreamReader to allow speeding up my applications 
without having to think in an asynchronous way or multi-threading while 
programming with it.
That's why I'm asking this here.
On 13/10/2016 14:45, Brunoais wrote:
Hi,
I looked at BufferedReader source code for java 9 long with the source code of 
the channels/streams used. I noticed that, like in java 7, BufferedReader does 
not use an Async API to load data from files, instead, the data loading is all 
done synchronously even when the OS allows requesting a file to be read and 
getting a warning later when the file is effectively read.
Why Is BufferedReader not async while providing a sync API?
<BufferedNonBlockStream.java><Tests.java>

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