Sending a Packet to a Number of Threads?

Question

I have a central information source (architecturally) and need some way to send the packet to each thread which does a fast operation and then waits for a new packet afterwards.

I'm weighing the pros and cons of a distributed system, as opposed to a hierarchical system.

I could give each thread its own BlockingQueue, but then I would have to:

a) make a blocking queue each class, and then make sure that it is populated from the central packet source (which I could automate with a method to do such a thing).

Or the central queue method would be something like:

A child class of blocking queue whose take method:

var result = topOfQueue
//wait on countdown latch static variable for ~7 threads
//latch released, immediatly wait on cyclic barrier for 8 threads (7 + 1 thread which is removes the topmost queue element then joins the barrier

the cyclic barrier). return result;

Is this a good architecture given my objectives of sharing the packet with each thread? Or is there a far more efficient architecture that I'm missing (or a class that already exists for this?)

Which would scale better?

Answer 1

I would start with something simple like an Executor. It manages a bunch of threads that receive work through a shared queue.

Also, I would set a set of (micro) benchmarks to confirm your design choices.

[edit] Or do you need to packet to be processed by every thread? In that case, you could make a set of single-threaded executors and copy the packet to each executor.

These are just some suggestions on how to go about it. I have no clue of this is a proper solution in your design.