Reactive threading behaviour

[tobyk]

Hi
I have some odd behaviour with the reactive nodes… may be a bug, may just be my poor understanding.

I want to parse a large CSV file but I don’t want it to interrupt my drawing.
I thought a perfect job for the reactive nodes to do in a background thread.

V1: when I set it up like this and click send I get a momentary freeze in framerate and my drawing stutters. I appear to get the result the next frame (although it’s a looong frame) which makes me think it’s happening on my main loop.

V2: when I add a delay to the event of zero seconds I get much better behaviour. I lose some FPS (but not a dramatic amount) for about 10 frames then the event returns. Which is what I’d expect from a background task.

This machine is a modest laptop Win10 x64 i5 with 2 cores.

If this isn’t a bug what’s happening here? How can I ensure a reactive event runs on a thread that isn’t mainloop?

[tonfilm]

hi toby,

the reactive nodes try to create as less threads as possible. so the ToObservable does not create a new thread by default. there is a parameter internally to set the scheduler but we have not yet published it.

for now you need to start a new thread with Interval or Timer, both create a new thread.

[tobyk]

Thanks heaps!

[tobyk]

Ah wait, is there a way to pass in a dynamic argument (other than the time) with observables generated by Interval or Timer? I think I need to pass in the path or stream of my CSV file in order to get it processed.

[tonfilm]

you can link into the region that needs it…? otherwise use ForEach or Project [Reactive]