As I’m moving deeper into my PhD, I’m getting into more Go programming for the systems that I’m building. One thing that I’m constantly doing is trying to create a background process that runs forever, and does some work at an interval. Concurrency in Go is native and therefore the use of threads and parallel processing is very simple, syntax-wise. However I am still solving problems that I wanted to make sure I recorded here.
Today’s problem involves getting a go routine to execute a function on an interval, say every 5 seconds or something like that. The foreground process will presumably be working until finished, and we want to make sure it can gracefully shutdown the background process without a delay. In order to communicate between threads in Go, you have to use a channel. I’ve put together the work from Timer Routines And Graceful Shutdowns In Go into a single snippet to remind myself how to do this:
The end result is a program that looks like this:
$ go run main.go
2016/06/25 21:27:51 Main started
2016/06/25 21:27:51 Worker Started
2016/06/25 21:27:58 Action complete!
2016/06/25 21:28:03 Action complete!
2016/06/25 21:28:11 Main out!
As you can see it’s seven seconds between “Worker Started” and the first “Action Complete!” (5 second delay plus 2 seconds work). The second “Action Complete!” is 5 seconds later however because the worker only waits 3 seconds to make up for the work time from the previous interval. Shutdown is called, and the program gracefully shuts down with no more actions.