## Y avoid blocking design

There are many contexts. I only know a few.

1st, let’s look at an socket context. Suppose there are many (like 500 or 50) sockets to process. We don’t want 50 threads. We prefer fewer, perhaps 1 thread to check each “ready” socket, transfer whatever data can be transferred then go back to waiting. In this context, we need either

• /readiness notification/, or
• polling
• … Both are compared on P51 [[TCP/IP sockets in C]]

2nd scenario — GUI. Blocking a UI-related thread (like the EDT) would freeze the screen.

3rd, let’s look at some DB request client. The request thread sends a request and it would take a long time to get a response. Blocking the request thread would waste some memory resource but not really CPU resource. It’s often better to deploy this thread to other tasks, if any.

Q: So what other tasks?
A: ANY task, in the thread pool design. The requester thread completes the sending task, and returns to the thread pool. It can pick up unrelated tasks. When the DB server responds, any thread in the pool can pick it up.

This can be seen as a “server bound” system, rather than IO bound or CPU bound. Both the CPU task queue and the IO task queue gets drained quickly.