multithreading - What is the best way to write to a file in a parallel thread in Java?

Question

I have a program that performs lots of calculations and reports them to a file frequently. I know that frequent write operations can slow a program down a lot, so to avoid it I'd like to have a second thread dedicated to the writing operations.

Right now I'm doing it with this class I wrote (the impatient can skip to the end of the question):

public class ParallelWriter implements Runnable {

    private File file;
    private BlockingQueue<Item> q;
    private int indentation;

    public ParallelWriter( File f ){
        file = f;
        q = new LinkedBlockingQueue<Item>();
        indentation = 0;
    }

    public ParallelWriter append( CharSequence str ){
        try {
            CharSeqItem item = new CharSeqItem();
            item.content = str;
            item.type = ItemType.CHARSEQ;
            q.put(item);
            return this;
        } catch (InterruptedException ex) {
            throw new RuntimeException( ex );
        }
    }

    public ParallelWriter newLine(){
        try {
            Item item = new Item();
            item.type = ItemType.NEWLINE;
            q.put(item);
            return this;
        } catch (InterruptedException ex) {
            throw new RuntimeException( ex );
        }
    }

    public void setIndent(int indentation) {
        try{
            IndentCommand item = new IndentCommand();
            item.type = ItemType.INDENT;
            item.indent = indentation;
            q.put(item);
        } catch (InterruptedException ex) {
            throw new RuntimeException( ex );
        }
    }

    public void end(){
        try {
            Item item = new Item();
            item.type = ItemType.POISON;
            q.put(item);
        } catch (InterruptedException ex) {
            throw new RuntimeException( ex );
        }
    }

    public void run() {

        BufferedWriter out = null;
        Item item = null;

        try{
            out = new BufferedWriter( new FileWriter( file ) );
            while( (item = q.take()).type != ItemType.POISON ){
                switch( item.type ){
                    case NEWLINE:
                        out.newLine();
                        for( int i = 0; i < indentation; i++ )
                            out.append("   ");
                        break;
                    case INDENT:
                        indentation = ((IndentCommand)item).indent;
                        break;
                    case CHARSEQ:
                        out.append( ((CharSeqItem)item).content );
                }
            }
        } catch (InterruptedException ex){
            throw new RuntimeException( ex );
        } catch  (IOException ex) {
            throw new RuntimeException( ex );
        } finally {
            if( out != null ) try {
                out.close();
            } catch (IOException ex) {
                throw new RuntimeException( ex );
            }
        }
    }

    private enum ItemType {
        CHARSEQ, NEWLINE, INDENT, POISON;
    }
    private static class Item {
        ItemType type;
    }
    private static class CharSeqItem extends Item {
        CharSequence content;
    }
    private static class IndentCommand extends Item {
        int indent;
    }
}

And then I use it by doing:

ParallelWriter w = new ParallelWriter( myFile );
new Thread(w).start();

/// Lots of
w.append(" things ").newLine();
w.setIndent(2);
w.newLine().append(" more things ");

/// and finally
w.end();

While this works perfectly well, I'm wondering: Is there a better way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

Your basic approach looks fine. I would structure the code as follows:

import java.io.BufferedWriter;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.Writer;
import java.util.concurrent.BlockingQueue;
import java.util.concurrent.LinkedBlockingQueue;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;

public interface FileWriter {
    FileWriter append(CharSequence seq);

    FileWriter indent(int indent);

    void close();
}

class AsyncFileWriter implements FileWriter, Runnable {
    private final File file;
    private final Writer out;
    private final BlockingQueue<Item> queue = new LinkedBlockingQueue<Item>();
    private volatile boolean started = false;
    private volatile boolean stopped = false;

    public AsyncFileWriter(File file) throws IOException {
        this.file = file;
        this.out = new BufferedWriter(new java.io.FileWriter(file));
    }

    public FileWriter append(CharSequence seq) {
        if (!started) {
            throw new IllegalStateException("open() call expected before append()");
        }
        try {
            queue.put(new CharSeqItem(seq));
        } catch (InterruptedException ignored) {
        }
        return this;
    }

    public FileWriter indent(int indent) {
        if (!started) {
            throw new IllegalStateException("open() call expected before append()");
        }
        try {
            queue.put(new IndentItem(indent));
        } catch (InterruptedException ignored) {
        }
        return this;
    }

    public void open() {
        this.started = true;
        new Thread(this).start();
    }

    public void run() {
        while (!stopped) {
            try {
                Item item = queue.poll(100, TimeUnit.MICROSECONDS);
                if (item != null) {
                    try {
                        item.write(out);
                    } catch (IOException logme) {
                    }
                }
            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
            }
        }
        try {
            out.close();
        } catch (IOException ignore) {
        }
    }

    public void close() {
        this.stopped = true;
    }

    private static interface Item {
        void write(Writer out) throws IOException;
    }

    private static class CharSeqItem implements Item {
        private final CharSequence sequence;

        public CharSeqItem(CharSequence sequence) {
            this.sequence = sequence;
        }

        public void write(Writer out) throws IOException {
            out.append(sequence);
        }
    }

    private static class IndentItem implements Item {
        private final int indent;

        public IndentItem(int indent) {
            this.indent = indent;
        }

        public void write(Writer out) throws IOException {
            for (int i = 0; i < indent; i++) {
                out.append(" ");
            }
        }
    }
}

If you do not want to write in a separate thread (maybe in a test?), you can have an implementation of FileWriter which calls append on the Writer in the caller thread.