Asynchronous Call

Asynchronous call in dubbo

As dubbo is based on a non-blocking NIO network layer, the client can start parallel call to multiple remote services without explicitly starting mulithreads, which costs relatively fewer resources.

/user-guide/images/future.jpg

You can config at consumer.xml for setup asynchronous call some remote service.

<dubbo:reference id="fooService" interface="com.alibaba.foo.FooService">
      <dubbo:method name="findFoo" async="true" />
</dubbo:reference>
<dubbo:reference id="barService" interface="com.alibaba.bar.BarService">
      <dubbo:method name="findBar" async="true" />
</dubbo:reference>

Configure the above configuration information,you can invoke the remote service in your code.

// the invoke will return null immediately
fooService.findFoo(fooId);
// get current invoke Future instance,when the remote service has return result,will notify this Future instance.
Future<Foo> fooFuture = RpcContext.getContext().getFuture();

// the invoke will return null immediately
barService.findBar(barId);
// get current invoke Future instance,when the remote service has return result,will notify this Future instance.
Future<Bar> barFuture = RpcContext.getContext().getFuture();

// now the request of findFoo and findBar was executed at same time,The client not need setup multithreading for parallel call, which is NIO-based non-blocking implementation of parallel calls

// Current thread will be blocking,and wait findFoo has return. when remote service has return findFoo result,the current thread will be wake up.
Foo foo = fooFuture.get();
// same to findFoo
Bar bar = barFuture.get();

// if findFoo expend five second for wait remote service  return result,and findBar expend six second. Actually,only expend six second will get findFoo and findBar result,and proceed to the next step.

You can also set whether to wait for the message to be sent:

  • sent="true" wait for the message to be send,if send failure，will throw exception.
  • sent="false" do not wait for the message to be send,when the message will push into io queue,will return immediately.

The Example:

<dubbo:method name="findFoo" async="true" sent="true" />

if you only want to asynchronous call,and don’t care the return.you can config return="false",To reduce the cost of creating and managing Future objects.

<dubbo:method name="findFoo" async="true" return="false" />

Last modified December 22, 2020: clean up website (6e41905afa)