Wanted: A guide to CPAN

The other day I was looking at a script that ran a bunch of more or less independent jobs in batches of four.

I’ve reproduced the core of the script as best as I can remember it.

Job

It has a class to represent the jobs themselves.

package Job;

use Moose;

has identifier => (
    is => 'ro',
    required => 1,
);

has cmd => (
    is => 'ro',
    required => 1,
);

no Moose;
__PACKAGE__->meta->make_immutable;

Job Manager

and a class that tries to ensure that 4 jobs are running in parallel wherever possible.

package JobManager;

use Moose;

use POSIX 'strftime';

has identifier => (
    is => 'ro',
    default => sub { strftime('%H%M%S', localtime(time())); },
);

has max_processes => (
    is => 'ro',
    default => 4,
);

has _job_id => (
    is => 'ro',
    writer => '_set_job_id',
    init_arg => undef,
    default => 1,
);

has queued_jobs => (
    is => 'ro',
    traits => ['Array'],
    isa => 'ArrayRef[Job]',
    default => sub { [] },
    handles => {
        enqueue_job => 'push',
        dequeue_job => 'shift',
        exist_queued_jobs => 'count',
    },
);

has running_jobs => (
    is => 'ro',
    traits => ['Hash'],
    isa => 'HashRef[Job]',
    default => sub { {} },
    handles => {
        add_running_job => 'set',
        delete_running_job => 'delete',
        num_jobs => 'count',
    },
);

sub next_job_id
{
    my $self = shift;
    my $job_id = $self->_job_id();
    $self->_set_job_id($job_id + 1);
    return sprintf "%02d", $job_id;
}

sub run_job
{
    my ($self, $job) = @_;

    my ($identifier, $cmd) = ($job->identifier(), $job->cmd());
    my $pid = fork();
    if (! defined($pid)) {
        say "Failed to run job $identifier";
    } elsif ($pid) {
        say "Running job $identifier ($pid)";
        $self->add_running_job($pid, $job);
    } else {
        system("$cmd > /tmp/$identifier.output 2>&1");
        exit;
    }
}

sub add_job
{
    my ($self, $name, $cmd) = @_;

    my $job = Job->new(
        identifier => (sprintf "%s_${name}_%s",
                               $self->next_job_id(), $self->identifier()),
        cmd => $cmd);

    if ($self->num_jobs() > $self->max_processes()) {
        $self->enqueue_job($job);
    } else {
        $self->run_job($job);
    }
}

sub main_loop
{
    my $self = shift;

    while (1) {
        my $pid = wait();
        last if ($pid < 0);
        say "Child $pid has exited";

        $self->delete_running_job($pid);
        while ($self->num_jobs() < $self->max_processes()) {
            last unless $self->exist_queued_jobs();
            $self->run_job($self->dequeue_job());
        }
    }
}

no Moose;
__PACKAGE__->meta->make_immutable;

Test Code

My test code to check if I got the code more or less correct.

my $manager = JobManager->new();

$manager->add_job('echo', 'sleep 10 ; echo hello');
for (1..9) {
    $manager->add_job('echo', 'sleep 2 ; echo hello');
}

$manager->main_loop();

jared@localhost $ ls -ltr /tmp/*echo*
-rw-r--r-- 1 jared jared 6 2011-07-03 19:32 /tmp/05_echo_193228.output
-rw-r--r-- 1 jared jared 6 2011-07-03 19:32 /tmp/04_echo_193228.output
-rw-r--r-- 1 jared jared 6 2011-07-03 19:32 /tmp/03_echo_193228.output
-rw-r--r-- 1 jared jared 6 2011-07-03 19:32 /tmp/02_echo_193228.output
-rw-r--r-- 1 jared jared 6 2011-07-03 19:32 /tmp/08_echo_193228.output
-rw-r--r-- 1 jared jared 6 2011-07-03 19:32 /tmp/07_echo_193228.output
-rw-r--r-- 1 jared jared 6 2011-07-03 19:32 /tmp/06_echo_193228.output
-rw-r--r-- 1 jared jared 6 2011-07-03 19:32 /tmp/10_echo_193228.output
-rw-r--r-- 1 jared jared 6 2011-07-03 19:32 /tmp/09_echo_193228.output
-rw-r--r-- 1 jared jared 6 2011-07-03 19:32 /tmp/01_echo_193228.output

Conclusion

I took two lessons away.

Parallel::Queue would have greatly simplified the core of this script. How many CPAN modules could my code benefit from equally if only I knew about them?

fork() is nice and easy to deal with. The code to manage the processes isn’t hugely complicated and seems pretty robust (careful, I may not have duplicated the robustness here).

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