bad use cases of scala.concurrent.blocking?

Question

With reference to the third point in this accepted answer, are there any cases for which it would be pointless or bad to use blocking for a long-running computa

Answer 1

It depends on the ExecutionContext your Future is being executed in.

Pointless:

If the ExecutionContext is not a BlockContext, then using blocking will be pointless. That is, it would use the DefaultBlockContext, which simply executes the code without any special handling. It probably wouldn't add that much overhead, but pointless nonetheless.

Bad:

Scala's ExecutionContext.Implicits.global is made to spawn new threads in a ForkJoinPool when the thread pool is about to be exhausted. That is, if it knows that is going to happen via blocking. This can be bad if you're spawning lots of threads. If you're queuing up a lot of work in a short span of time, the global context will happily expand until gridlock. @dk14's answer explains this in more depth, but the gist is that it can be a performance killer as managed blocking can actually become quickly unmanageable.

---

The main purpose of blocking is to avoid deadlocks within thread pools, so it is tangentially related to performance in the sense that reaching a deadlock would be worse than spawning a few more threads. However, it is definitely not a magical performance enhancer.

I've written more about blocking in particular in this answer.

Answer 2

From my practice, blocking + ForkJoinPool may lead to contionuous and uncontrollable creation of threads if you have a lot of messages to process and each one requires long blocking (which also means that it holds some memory during such). ForkJoinPool creates new thread to compensate the "managable blocked" one, regardless of MaxThreadCount; say hello to hundreds of threads in VisualVm. And it almost kills backpressure, as there is always a place for task in the pool's queue (if your backpressure is based on ThreadPoolExecutor's policies). Performance becomes killed by both new-thread-allocation and garbage collection.

So:

• it's good when message rate is not much higher than 1/blocking_time as it allows you to use full power of threads. Some smart backpressure might help to slow down incoming messages.
• It's pointless if a task actually uses your CPU during blocking{} (no locks), as it will just increase counts of threads more than count of real cores in system.
• And bad for any other cases - you should use separate fixed thread-pool (and maybe polling) then.

P.S. blocking is hidden inside Await.result, so it's not always obvious. In our project someone just did such Await inside some underlying worker actor.