Here's a queue that handles async functions in order with a wait time between each callback. You can call it from anywhere, all tasks will stay in order and won't overlap each other. It can be used for rate limiting, for example.
There's also an NPM package that has a more complete API: dumb-queue.
Top comments (7)
Array.prototype.shift()is useful but rarely "performant" in terms of CPU.A common tactic is to use two arrays:
queue)one for consuming items (
dequeue).
The
dequeueoperation simply iterates through its current array without ever removing anything.When all the items in the
dequeuearray have been consumed it quickly truncates the array witharray.length = 0. Then both arrays are swapped anddequeuestarts over whilequeuehas an empty array topushnew items onto.PS: In your particular use case I doubt it matters but I'm a bit puzzled how other implementations were "performing poorly".
Also the promise seems to exist just for the sake of the of the
async/awaitsyntax. Simply scheduling a macrotask should work just fine but maybe I'm missing something.Indeed ! That's the only thing that was bothering me because the time complexity of the dequeue is O(n). The solution you're proposing would optimize this.
Even if I don't really like the unclean side of setting the array length to
0arbitrarily, it is probably more performant to only resize an existing array than creating a new one on the heap.Thanks for the cool advice !
Example codesandbox
Just change the following line to change the implementation :
Thanks for the code! I appreciate it, and it will save me a lot of time as it would have been the first time that I implement this kind of algorithm. I will refactor the library and will update the snippet soon according to your implementation.
Is it actually faster for your use case though?
That scenario was limited to 350 effects to reliably stay under the 5 second timeout and if there is a difference it's likely only around 10 ms.
At this point I don't know how many thousands of queued effects you would need to see a benefit.
This was for an old use case so I need to create benchmarks to see how both solutions behave.
For the little story, at the time when I wrote this code I needed a performant rate limiter library to handle dozens of thousands running callbacks. But they were all bloated, or buggy, or had poor performance. So I came up with this tiny cuttie.