Do you know that the C++ library Asio provides side by side support for asynchronous and synchronous operations? Do you know that asynchronous support is based on Proactor Design Pattern?
In this article, we will discuss about Asio Proactor. We will discuss about Proactor design pattern. We will also see advantages and disadvantages of Proactor design pattern.
Proactor can be defined as a software design pattern that is used for handling events in activities that are long running and are running asynchronously. The asynchronous operations are based on the Proactor design pattern. Moving forward, let’s discuss about the Proactor design pattern.
Proactor Design Pattern
The Proactor design pattern consists of following parts:
👉 Asynchronous Operation are the operations that are executed asynchronously. For example, reading or writing on a socket asynchronously.
👉 Asynchronous OperationProcessor is used for executing asynchronous operations. The Internal services like reactive socket service are examples of an asynchronous operation processor.
👉 Completion Event Queue is used to buffer completion events till they are not dequeued by asynchronous events.
👉 Completion Handler is used to process the result part of asynchronous operations.
👉 Asynchronous Event Demultiplexer is used to stop waiting for events so that they can appear on the completion event queue and return completed event.
👉 Proactor is used to call an asynchronous event demultiplexer in order to dequeue events.
👉 Initiator is used to interact with an asynchronous operation processor.
Advantages of Asio-Proactor Design Pattern
The following are the advantages of asio-proactor design pattern:
👉The Asio Proactor design pattern helps programmers not to create many threads in order to achieve concurrency.
👉The system performance and scalability increase by using the Asio Proactor design pattern as with asynchronous operations, we can avoid the cost of context switching by reducing threads and can activate only those threads that have events to process.
Disadvantages of Asio-Proactor Design Pattern
The following are the disadvantages of asio-proactor design pattern:
👉Using Asio Proactor design pattern, the program becomes very complex because it is difficult to make programs using asynchronous operations.
👉The Asio Proactor design pattern uses a lot of memory as it requires large buffer space for read and write operations which may sometimes continue indefinitely. For each concurrent operation, a separate buffer is also required.
Asio helps in doing network programming using C++ language. It allows the processing of data asynchronously by providing asynchronous I/O models.
What is Context Switching?
Context switching is used to store the status of the process or threads. It is helpful in restoring and resuming the execution of the processes.
How can Asio Proactor be implemented?
The Asio Proactor can be implemented using Reactor and Windows overlapped Input Output.
Conclusion
In this article, we have learned about Asio Proactor. We have discussed proactor design pattern. We have also seen the advantages and disadvantages of proactor design patterns. To learn more about the Asio library, you can read the below-mentioned articles:
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