# Threads or Fibers - which should I use?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/threads-or-fibers-which-should-i-use/182047>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [January 21, 2010, 11:28pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/threads-or-fibers-which-should-i-use/182047 "2010-01-21T23:28:20Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![elricstorm](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/da6949/32.png) [@elricstorm](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/elricstorm)\
**Post date:** [January 21, 2010, 11:28pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/threads-or-fibers-which-should-i-use/182047/1 "2010-01-21T23:28:20Z")

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My application will perform a number of tasks. As it is a GUI  
application, I want the application to remain responsive to other input  
while it’s performing other tasks. A good example of this might be:

A search operation  
A compile operation

While the search operation is in effect, no other searches can be  
performed until the operation is completed. While a compile operation  
is in effect, no other compile option can be completed.

However, a search operation, a compile operation, and other GUI  
functionality should still be accessible and responsive.

Give this scenario, which would be better to use - threads or fibers?

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**Author:** ![elricstorm](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/da6949/32.png) [@elricstorm](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/elricstorm)\
**Post date:** [January 22, 2010, 12:14am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/threads-or-fibers-which-should-i-use/182047/2 "2010-01-22T00:14:19Z")

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Alpha B. wrote:

> However, a search operation, a compile operation, and other GUI  
> functionality should still be accessible and responsive.
> 
> Give this scenario, which would be better to use - threads or fibers?

Have you considered three _processes_, GUI, search, and compile, with  
communication over drb? That way, the GUI event loop is never encumbered  
with other tasks and is robust to failures of those tasks. Plus, you  
make use of \>1 core.

This might not work well if a huge volume of objects must be shared  
between the tasks, but that doesn’t seem likely from your description.

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**Author:** ![elricstorm](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/da6949/32.png) [@elricstorm](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/elricstorm)\
**Post date:** [January 22, 2010, 12:36am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/threads-or-fibers-which-should-i-use/182047/3 "2010-01-22T00:36:45Z")

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Hi Joel.

Let me provide a little more detail.

The logic of the gui itself revolves around building fields that will  
eventually be used as web search logic. I’ve written a similar program  
in AutoIt which used a lot of C++ core api. The field elements in the  
gui are taken and converted into specific string reference, built as a  
complete search string and sent to a search engine. This means that  
during search functionality I need to make use of sockets.

Brief example:

Say I wanted the program to search for specific stocks across 5 major  
stock sites at the same time, pull the data from those sites, compile  
the data to see what matches/compares, and display only the relevant  
data that has the most recent timestamp. In this particular example, it  
would act as a stock ticker.

So, using this example, the Gui will be comprised of the following:

An area to hold stock symbols  
An area to hold stock data  
An options area for limiting returns by specific criteria  
A status bar that’s divided over 3 fields, with one being a built-in  
clock.  
Etc…

You can probably get a visual idea of what’s going on with this. In  
addition, I’m using the following things to develop my gui app.

WxRuby (as my gui library)  
DialogBlocks (as my gui designer - xrc builder)  
wx\_sugar (to setup a frame.rb template for holding all the xrc data)  
my\_program (which puts the xrc data together along with the listener  
events)  
etc…

I’m still getting my feet wet with designing ruby gui applications but I  
learn fast - always have. I’ve already built at least 10 listener  
events and designed a good portion of the gui (being that I already had  
a gui created from a former programming lanugage to inherit from).

What I’m trying to do now is setup the transitions of my app. I don’t  
want to go through the motions and find that it’s stuck in a loop or  
that it appears unresponsive… In AutoIt, sleep events were used like  
timers but with loop conditionals attached to them. So, the main gui  
would run a large loop and once a listener event was hit, the loop would  
exit, the event would be run, and once the event finished, it would  
initiate the main gui loop again and setup listening. As you can see  
here, this wasn’t multi-threaded and it simply was frustrating to use.

I’m trying to adapt my old program to something better and also allow  
for cross-platform accessibility.

Suggestions based off my criteria?

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![elricstorm](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/da6949/32.png) [@elricstorm](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/elricstorm)\
**Post date:** [January 22, 2010, 2:02am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/threads-or-fibers-which-should-i-use/182047/4 "2010-01-22T02:02:05Z")

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Well, after doing a lot of research on this, I’ve come up with the  
following:

Fibers would be faster and use less memory for blocking I/O. Threads  
are necessary for blocking CPU.

Because my app requires CPU blocking and I/O blocking I could  
incorporate both. One of the fibers library I was looking over appears  
very solid: (neverblock): [GitHub - oldmoe/neverblock: A collection of high level non-blocking IO libraries](http://github.com/oldmoe/neverblock)

I’m still looking over other solutions.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![elricstorm](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/da6949/32.png) [@elricstorm](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/elricstorm)\
**Post date:** [January 22, 2010, 9:43am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/threads-or-fibers-which-should-i-use/182047/5 "2010-01-22T09:43:13Z")

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On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 2:23 AM, Robert K.  
[removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> In your case I would start with threads because they are simpler to  
> use. Â Fibers are really a means of cooperative multitasking and as  
> such have considerably higher programming overhead. Â Also, either you  
> have one thread per Fiber or you will not be able to leverage the full  
> CPU power if you port your app to a Ruby version (say JRuby) which  
> supports native threads.

It’s worth mentioning that on JRuby, we have to use native threads to  
implement Fibers, so they’re not actually lightweight. They’re more  
like cooperatively-scheduled child threads. I’d recommend threads as  
well if the intent is to actually have parallel execution.

- Charlie

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![elricstorm](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/e/da6949/32.png) [@elricstorm](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/elricstorm)\
**Post date:** [January 22, 2010, 9:24am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/threads-or-fibers-which-should-i-use/182047/6 "2010-01-22T09:24:30Z")

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2010/1/22 Alpha B. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid):

> I’m still looking over other solutions.  
> In your case I would start with threads because they are simpler to  
> use. Fibers are really a means of cooperative multitasking and as  
> such have considerably higher programming overhead. Also, either you  
> have one thread per Fiber or you will not be able to leverage the full  
> CPU power if you port your app to a Ruby version (say JRuby) which  
> supports native threads.

My 0.02EUR.

Kind regards

robert