Wednesday 10 August 2011

Object Pool - Quick and Short in .NET 4.0

A simple object pool that could be used to maintain a set of objects readily available in memory, especially if you see that the object creation time is heavy. Eg:- creation of a MemoryStream on a need basis is typically time consuming in a server based app. In this case, it could best to have a set of MemoryStream objects readily available in memory. But, we definitely have to make sure to couple of things first :

1.) The way the object pool is filled happens is async.
2.) Access to a pool instance from the client app is thread safe.

To solve 1, we could exploit the AsyncMethodCaller together with its BeginInvoke(), while to make sure that the access to the pool is thread safe, we could check out the ConcurrentBag in .NET 4.0. So, where is the code?!

namespace HoC.Client
{
    /// <summary>
    /// maintains a pool/list of objects, provides it on request
    /// usually used for classes whose construction call is heavy
    /// </summary>
    /// <typeparam name="W"></typeparam>
    public class ObjectInstancePool<W>
    {
        private const int objectCount = 20; //can be updated to receive through the constructor
        private ConcurrentBag<W> objectList = new ConcurrentBag<W>();

        public ObjectInstancePool()
        {
            //refresh the bag first
            new AsyncMethodCaller(Filler).BeginInvoke(null, null);
        }

        public W GetInstance()
        {
            W result;

            if (!(objectList.TryTake(out result)))
            {
                result = Activator.CreateInstance<W>();
            }
            else
                new AsyncMethodCaller(Filler).BeginInvoke(null, null); //refresh the bag
            
            return result;
        }

        public delegate void AsyncMethodCaller();

        private void Filler()
        {
            while (objectList.Count < objectCount)
            {
                objectList.Add(Activator.CreateInstance<W>());
            }
        }
    }
}


I totally like it short and sweet :)



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