Java: Aggregate Data Off-Heap
Explore how to create off-heap aggregations with a minimum of garbage collect impact and maximum memory utilization.
Creating large aggregations using Java Map, List and Object normally creates a lot of heap memory overhead. This also means that the garbage collector will have to clean up these objects once the aggregation goes out of scope.
Read this short article and discover how we can use Speedment Stream ORM to create off-heap aggregations that can utilize memory more fficiently and with little or no GC impact.
Person
Let’s say we have a large number of Person
objects that take the following shape:
public class Person { private final int age; private final short height; private final short weight; private final String gender; private final double salary; … // Getters and setters hidden for brievity }
For the sake of argument, we also have access to a method called persons()
that will create a new Stream
with all these Person
objects.
Salary per Age
We want to create the average salary for each age bucket. To represent the results of aggregations we will be using a data class called AgeSalary
which associates a certain age with an average salary.
public class AgeSalary { private int age; private double avgSalary; … // Getters and setters hidden for brievity }
Age grouping for salaries normally entails less than 100 buckets being used and so this example is just to show the principle. The more buckets, the more sense it makes to aggregate off-heap.
Solution
Using Speedment Stream ORM, we can derive an off-heap aggregation solution with these three steps:
Create an Aggregator
var aggregator = Aggregator.builderOfType(Person.class, AgeSalary::new) .on(Person::age).key(AgeSalary::setAge) .on(Person::salary).average(AgeSalary::setAvgSalary) .build();
The aggregator can be reused over and over again.
Compute an Aggregation
var aggregation = persons().collect(aggregator.createCollector());
Using the aggregator, we create a standard Java stream Collector that has its internal state completely off-heap.
Use the Aggregation Result
aggregation.streamAndClose() .forEach(System.out::println);
Since the Aggregation holds data that is stored off-heap, it may benefit from explicit closing rather than just being cleaned up potentially much later. Closing the Aggregation can be done by calling the close()
method, possibly by taking advantage of the AutoCloseable
trait, or as in the example above by using streamAndClose()
which returns a stream that will close the Aggregation
after stream termination.
Everything in a One-Liner
The code above can be condensed to what is effective a one-liner:
persons().collect(Aggregator.builderOfType(Person.class, AgeSalary::new) .on(Person::age).key(AgeSalary::setAge) .on(Person::salary).average(AgeSalary::setAvgSalary) .build() .createCollector() ).streamAndClose() .forEach(System.out::println);
There is also support for parallel aggregations. Just add the stream operation Stream::parallel
and aggregation is done using the ForkJoin
pool.
Resources
Download Speedment here
Read more about off-heap aggregations here
Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Per Minborg, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: Java: Aggregate Data Off-Heap Opinions expressed by Java Code Geeks contributors are their own. |