A buffering worker

[AlexHill]

I have a use-case that the existing concepts don't quite seem to cover, and I'm wondering how I might extend ProcessScheduler to support it.

What I'd like is a kind of combination of a cumulative worker and a concurrent buffer, that works with SelectWorkers. The worker should have an associated buffer of a given size, and each task will use a certain amount of that buffer. A task may be assigned to a worker if the unused buffer is greater than the amount the task requires. The buffer level is automatically increased and decreased when a task starts and ends.

An applicable analogy is a CPU (worker) with access to a certain amount of RAM (buffer) running concurrent processes that each require a certain amount of RAM.

With a small patch, I can nearly fake this using the existing API:

• for each worker, create a CumulativeWorker and a ConcurrentBuffer
• set the buffer's initial capacity to its upper bound, and its lower bound to zero
• for each task that needs this worker, both unload and load the worker's buffer (this is where the patch was necessary)

This appears to do exactly what I want. But it can't be used with SelectWorkers, because the buffers can't be selectively used. I need to somehow express the constraint that a task should only load and unload the buffer of the workers it is assigned to.

Can you give me any pointers as to where I might go from here?