rubycelluloid

Is there a way to call a block every microsecond using celluloid?


I'm using celluloid's every method to execute a block every microsecond however it seems to always call the block every second even when I specify a decimal.

interval = 1.0 / 2.0

every interval do
  puts "*"*80
  puts "Time: #{Time.now}"
  puts "*"*80
end

I would expect this to be called every 0.5 seconds. But it is called every one second.

Any suggestions?


Solution

  • You can get fractional second resolution with Celluloid.

    Celluloid uses the Timers gem to manage the every, which does good floating point time math and ruby's sleep which has reasonable sub-second resolution.

    The following code works perfectly:

    class Bob
      include Celluloid
      def fred
        every 0.5 do
          puts Time.now.strftime "%M:%S.%N"
        end
      end
    end
    
    Bob.new.fred
    

    And it produces the following output:

    22:51.299923000
    22:51.801311000
    22:52.302229000
    22:52.803512000
    22:53.304800000
    22:53.805759000
    22:54.307003000
    22:54.808279000
    22:55.309358000
    22:55.810017000
    

    As you can see, it is not perfect, but close enough for most purposes.

    If you are seeing different results, it is likely because of how long your code takes in the block you have given to every or other timers running and starving that particular one. I would approach it by simplifying the situation as much as possible and slowly adding parts back in to determine where the slowdown is occurring.

    As for microsecond resolution, I don't think you can hope to get that far down reliably with any non-trivial code.

    The trivial example:

    def bob
      puts Time.now.strftime "%M:%S.%N"
      sleep 1.0e-6
      puts Time.now.strftime "%M:%S.%N"
    end
    

    Produces:

    31:07.373858000
    31:07.373936000
    
    
    31:08.430110000
    31:08.430183000
    
    
    31:09.062000000
    31:09.062079000
    
    
    31:09.638078000
    31:09.638156000
    

    So as you can see, even just a base ruby version on my machine running nothing but a simple IO line doesn't reliably give me microsecond speeds.