Splitting Responsibility into a Producer and a Consumer

Splitting Responsibility into a Producer and a Consumer

A producer-consumer model is similar to both the pipeline model and the client-server. Here, the producer is generating units of work, and the consumer is taking those units of work and performing some kind of process on them.

For example, the movie-rendering problem described earlier might have a set of pro-ducers generating rendered frames of a movie. The consumer might be the task that has the work of ordering these frames correctly and then saving them to disk.

This can be represented as multiple copies of task A sending results to a single copy of task B, as shown in Figure 3.21. Alternatively, there could be multiple producers and a single consumer or multiple producers and consumers.

Again, this approach does not necessarily reduce the latency of the tasks but provides an improvement in throughput by allowing multiple tasks to progress simultaneously. In common with the client-server task, it may also provide a way of reducing the complex-ity of combining the output from multiple producers of data.