typelevel / typelevel/cats-effect

`parTraverseN` fairness

Open
#4,262 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
Scala
Stars
2.2k
Forks
576
Avg merge
2d 11h
Merged PRs (30d)
18

Description

The documentation of parTraverseN explicitly mentions fairness:

Note that the semantics of this operation aim to maximise fairness: when a spot to execute becomes available, every task has a chance to claim it, and not only the next n tasks in ta

But, based on some testing, later tasks in ta have a very very small chance of overtaking earlier ones. I suspect this is very task- and processor dependent, but (based on the wording) it seems to me that whoever wrote the docs felt that this is an important feature of parTraverseN, so it might be worth looking into...

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the parTraverseN fairness documentation in kernel/shared/src/main/scala/cats/effect/kernel/GenConcurrent.scala at the linked lines, then locate the corresponding parTraverseN implementation and reproduce the reported behavior under different task and processor conditions. Determine whether the observed scheduling contradicts the documented fairness semantics; done means a confirmed behavior and an agreed implementation or documentation change.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
scala
Domain
backend
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.