Flow control

A client application rapidly making thousands of calls to Diffusion™ Cloud might overflow the internal queues for the client, which results in that client session being closed. Flow control automatically protects against these queues overflowing by progressively delaying messages from the client to Diffusion Cloud .

Supported platforms: Android™ , Java™ , .NET, and C

The flow control mechanism is a feature of the Diffusion Cloud client libraries that works automatically to protect the following internal queues for an individual client from overflowing:

The outbound queue on the client where messages are queued to be sent to Diffusion Cloud
The queue on Diffusion Cloud where responses to service requests are queued.

If these queues overflow, the client session is terminated.

Flow control is intended to benefit those clients that send a lot of data to Diffusion Cloud – for example, updates to publish to topics. Usually, these clients are those located in the back-end of your solution that perform control functions.

When is flow control enabled?

The client determines whether to enable flow control and the amount of delay to introduce into the client processing based on a calculated value called back pressure. Back pressure is calculated using the following criteria:

Depth of the outbound client queue
The number of pending responses to service requests
Whether the current active thread is a callback thread

Back pressure can have a value between 0.0 and 1.0. 1.0 is the maximum amount of back pressure. The method used to calculate back pressure might be subject to change in future releases.

Flow control introduces sleeps into the client processing. The length of these sleeps depends on the value of the back pressure. The maximum amount of delay introduced into client processing by flow control is 100 ms. The amount of delay introduced by flow control might be subject to change in future releases.

The flow control behavior of a client cannot be configured.

How to tell that flow control is enabled

When flow control is enabled for a Android , Java , or .NET client, the client logs messages at DEBUG level. The client logs each time a delay is introduced. The log message has the following form:

2016-09-26 11:15:48,344 DEBUG [PushConnectorPool-thread-18] c.p.d.f.SleepingFlowControl(apply) - pressure=1.0 => sleep for 100 ms

The log message includes the current back pressure and the length of delay introduced.

The C client does not log its flow control behavior.