long and possibly inifinite observer/observable notifying loops

[DU VIGNAUD DE VILLEFORT FRANCOIS GASAPRD PHI]

Hi all,

 

 

I have found that in some cases we can have some huge (possibly infinite) observer/observable notifying chains. (ie: one call to the notifyObservers method trigger millions of calls to notifyObservers). This obviously occurs when we create a circular observer/observable chain and no lazyObject is included in. But it also occurs in the case of a reconvergent chaining ( ie: a set of objects are both observing the same object and are all observed by another one) which multiply the number of notifying calls.

IMHO we should make more objects inherit from LazyObject (even if they are not computing anything actually) taking some extra care about what we expose in the base classes. Indeed it might happen that some LazyObjects might not act as LazyObjects. Indeed these objects (PiecewiseYieldCurve for instance) are bypassing the LazyOject behavior by call the notifyObservers method directly. (see update() method of PiecewiseYieldCurve).

Thanks for your attention,

Rgds,

François

 

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[Luigi Ballabio]

Hi Francois,

On Thu, 2007-03-22 at 13:04 +0100, DU VIGNAUD DE VILLEFORT FRANCOIS
GASAPRD PHI wrote:
> I have found that in some cases we can have some huge (possibly
> infinite) observer/observable notifying chains. (ie: one call to the
> notifyObservers method trigger millions of calls to notifyObservers).
> This obviously occurs when we create a circular observer/observable
> chain and no lazyObject is included in.

True. LazyObject doesn't help, either (see below.) But if you have such
a cycle, there's something wrong in the way you built your objects.

>  But it also occurs in the case of a reconvergent chaining ( ie: a set
> of objects are both observing the same object and are all observed by
> another one) which multiply the number of notifying calls.

Yes, but this can hardly trigger millions of calls. A chain like the one
you described triggers N calls where N is the dimension of the set. To
get quadratic behavior or worse, you'd need two or more recombining
chains in sequence. What kind of setup do you have?

> IMHO we should make more objects inherit from LazyObject (even if they
> are not computing anything actually) taking some extra care about what
> we expose in the base classes. Indeed it might happen that some
> LazyObjects might not act as LazyObjects. Indeed these objects
> (PiecewiseYieldCurve for instance) are bypassing the LazyOject
> behavior by call the notifyObservers method directly. (see update()
> method of PiecewiseYieldCurve).

LazyObject has nothing to do with it. Laziness causes it to postpone
calculations, but observers have to be notified immediately. If this
were not so, recalculation might never happen. Let's imagine that a lazy
object receives a notification from an observable. If the lazy object
waited to notify its observers until they ask for calculation, the
observers would not know that something is changed; therefore, they
would not ask the lazy object for an updated value, and the lazy object
still wouldn't notify them. In short, the notification would be lost.

Thus, notification cannot be lazy. And in fact, PiecewiseYieldCurve does
not bypass the behavior of LazyObject; the call to notifyObservers() is
inside LazyObject::update() itself. Although a problem might be that
PiecewiseYieldCurve calls the update() methods of both its base classes,
and therefore ends up calling notifyObservers() twice.

Later,
        Luigi



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