Loose-ends wrapup

[Brian Goetz]

Even if we accept that hinting is needed, its not clear what the best 
hints are; hints about Q might be more useful than attempting to set 
splitting parameters.  (And, there are more than one splitting parameter 
we might want to set.  For example, if the pipeline has a highly 
selective filter, we might want to adjust target chunk size.)  And hints 
beget more hints.

So I still don't think we know what we'd want even if we knew we wanted 
something :(


On 5/15/2013 11:02 AM, Doug Lea wrote:
>
> One more, that Brian and I have discussed off an on for a year or so,
> that always ends up as too hard to decide.
>
> Do we want to overload Collection.parallelStream(int minParSize)?
> minParSize is the minimum number of elements to process in parallel,
> else sequential.
>
> And/or overload Stream.parallel().
>
> Arguments for:
>
> * Parallel performance for the combination of small N and
> cheap lambdas (like adding numbers) is crummy. There's
> little hope of automating decisions unless/until we can
> automate cost metrics of lambdas, which is not going to happen
> any time soon.
>
> * People might want to write code that uses parallelStrerams
> only if they have a lot of elements, that they might not
> know ahead of time.
>
> Against:
>
> * Most people do not know what values are reasonable.
>
> * The "best" values are likely to change in the future.
>
> One compromise is to do this only for the custom CHM parallel
> task methods, that are most likely to be used only by people
> who are also most likely to want to tune performance.
>
> (I'm on my way out to a conference program committee meeting
> for two days, so replies might be slow.)
>
> -Doug
>
>
>