poolgirl - A sexy Erlang worker pool factory

Poolgirl is a lightweight, generic pooling library for Erlang with a focus on simplicity, performance, and rock-solid disaster recovery. Poolgirl is Poolboy's little sister, it's directed towards the use-case of simple workers that process requests with no need for a reply (ie. that only handle cast requests)

Usage

1> Worker = poolgirl:checkout(PoolName).
<0.9001.0>
2> gen_server:call(Worker, Request).
ok

Q: Is this in any way related with poolboy? A: Yes, the interface and configuration is mostly the same, however poolgirl adds some additional methods.

Q: So what's the difference, why another worker pool manager? A: Poolboy's manager of workers is a single gen_server process, in pools with a large number of workers the manager itself can become a bottleneck, a possible solution is to have multiple managers and load balance these. In use-case scenarios where the pool workers only handle cast requests and have a fast execution time per request (eg. analytics reporting, stats reporting) poolgirl overcomes this issue and lets you have high worker numbers with no additional overhead.

Q: How does it work under the hood? A: When a client requests a worker from the pool no messages are sent to any other process in order to accomplish this, poolgirl accesses a pg2 process group and recruits a random worker.

Q: But won't that overload the workers message queue? You're basically choosing a worker at random. A: That is true, hence the fact the poolgirl is best suited to the use-case described above, if you're making long synchronous requests to workers then you're probably better off sticking with poolboy.

Q: So if it's the client that recruits the worker what does the checkin operation do? A: Nothing, it's there basically to ease the transition between poolboy <-> poolgirl

API

• checkout/1: recruits a worker from the requested pool
• checkin/1: does nothing
• transaction/2: recruits a worker from the requested pool and executes a funcion with the worker pid as argument
• get_workers/1: returns a list of worker pids
• status/1: returns the pool status
• spin/3: spins up/down pool workers, these are immediately added/removed from the worker pool

Example

This is an example application showcasing database connection pools using Poolgirl and epgsql.

example.app

{application, example, [
    {description, "An example application"},
    {vsn, "0.1"},
    {applications, [kernel, stdlib, sasl, crypto, ssl]},
    {modules, [example, example_worker]},
    {registered, [example]},
    {mod, {example, []}},
    {env, [
        {pools, [
            {pool1, [
                {size, 10}
            ], [
                {hostname, "127.0.0.1"},
                {database, "db1"},
                {username, "db1"},
                {password, "abc123"}
            ]},
            {pool2, [
                {size, 5}
            ], [
                {hostname, "127.0.0.1"},
                {database, "db2"},
                {username, "db2"},
                {password, "abc123"}
            ]}
        ]}
    ]}
]}.

example.erl

-module(example).
-behaviour(application).
-behaviour(supervisor).

-export([start/0, stop/0, squery/2, equery/3]).
-export([start/2, stop/1]).
-export([init/1]).

start() ->
    application:start(?MODULE).

stop() ->
    application:stop(?MODULE).

start(_Type, _Args) ->
    supervisor:start_link({local, example_sup}, ?MODULE, []).

stop(_State) ->
    ok.

init([]) ->
    {ok, Pools} = application:get_env(example, pools),
    PoolSpecs = lists:map(fun({Name, SizeArgs, WorkerArgs}) ->
        PoolArgs = [{name, {local, Name}},
                    {worker_module, example_worker}] ++ SizeArgs,
        poolgirl:child_spec(Name, PoolArgs, WorkerArgs)
    end, Pools),
    {ok, {{one_for_one, 10, 10}, PoolSpecs}}.

squery(PoolName, Sql) ->
    poolgirl:transaction(PoolName, fun(Worker) ->
        gen_server:call(Worker, {squery, Sql})
    end).

equery(PoolName, Stmt, Params) ->
    poolgirl:transaction(PoolName, fun(Worker) ->
        gen_server:call(Worker, {equery, Stmt, Params})
    end).

example_worker.erl

-module(example_worker).
-behaviour(gen_server).
-behaviour(poolgirl_worker).

-export([start_link/1]).
-export([init/1, handle_call/3, handle_cast/2, handle_info/2, terminate/2,
         code_change/3]).

-record(state, {conn}).

start_link(Args) ->
    gen_server:start_link(?MODULE, Args, []).

init(Args) ->
    process_flag(trap_exit, true),
    Hostname = proplists:get_value(hostname, Args),
    Database = proplists:get_value(database, Args),
    Username = proplists:get_value(username, Args),
    Password = proplists:get_value(password, Args),
    {ok, Conn} = epgsql:connect(Hostname, Username, Password, [
        {database, Database}
    ]),
    {ok, #state{conn=Conn}}.

handle_call({squery, Sql}, _From, #state{conn=Conn}=State) ->
    {reply, epgsql:squery(Conn, Sql), State};
handle_call({equery, Stmt, Params}, _From, #state{conn=Conn}=State) ->
    {reply, epgsql:equery(Conn, Stmt, Params), State};
handle_call(_Request, _From, State) ->
    {reply, ok, State}.

handle_cast(_Msg, State) ->
    {noreply, State}.

handle_info(_Info, State) ->
    {noreply, State}.

terminate(_Reason, #state{conn=Conn}) ->
    ok = epgsql:close(Conn),
    ok.

code_change(_OldVsn, State, _Extra) ->
    {ok, State}.

Options

• name: the pool name
• worker_module: the module that represents the workers
• size: maximum pool size

Original Author

• Luis Rascão (lrascao) [email protected]

License

Poolgirl is available under the MIT license (see LICENSE).