async-sema

This is a semaphore implementation for use with async and await. The implementation follows the traditional definition of a semaphore rather than the definition of an asynchronous semaphore. Where as the latter one generally allows every defined task to proceed immediately and synchronizes at the end, async-sema allows only a selected number of tasks to proceed at once while the rest will remain waiting.

Async-sema manages the semaphore count as a list of tokens instead of a single variable containing the number of available resources. This enables an interesting application of managing the actual resources with the semaphore object itself. To make it practical the constructor for Sema includes an option for providing an init function for the semaphore tokens. Use of a custom token initializer is demonstrated in example1.js.

Usage

Firstly, add the package to your project's dependencies:

npm install --save async-sema

Then start using it like shown here.

Example

See /examples for more use cases.

const Sema = require('async-sema');
const s = new Sema(
  4, // Allow 4 concurrent async calls
  {
    capacity: 100 // Prealloc space for 100 tokens
  }
);

async function fetchData(x) {
  await s.acquire()
  try {
    console.log(s.nrWaiting() + ' calls to fetch are waiting')
    // ... do some async stuff with x
  } finally {
    s.release();
  }
}

const data = await Promise.all(array.map(fetchData));

The package also offers a simple rate limiter utilizing the semaphore implementation.

const RateLimit = require('async-sema/rate-limit');

async function f() {
  const lim = RateLimit(5); // rps

  for (let i = 0; i < n; i++) {
    await lim();
    // ... do something async
  }
}

API

Constructor(nr, { initFn, pauseFn, resumeFn, capacity })

• nr The maximum number of callers allowed to acquire the semaphore concurrently.
• initFn Function that is used to initialize the tokens used to manage the semaphore. The default is () => '1'.
• pauseFn An optional fuction that is called to opportunistically request pausing the the incoming stream of data, instead of piling up waiting promises and possibly running out of memory. See examples/pausing.js.
• resumeFn An optional function that is called when there is room again to accept new waiters on the semaphore. This function must be declared if a pauseFn is declared.
• capacity Sets the size of the preallocated waiting list inside the semaphore. This is typically used by high performance where the developer can make a rough estimate of the number of concurrent users of a semaphore.

async drain()

Drains the semaphore and returns all the initialized tokens in an array. Draining is an ideal way to ensure there are no pending async tasks, for example before a process will terminate.

nrWaiting()

Returns the number of callers waiting on the semaphore, i.e. the number of pending promises.

async acquire()

Acquire a token from the semaphore, thus decrement the number of available execution slots. If initFn is not used then the return value of the function can be discarded.

release(token)

Release the semaphore, thus increment the number of free execution slots. If initFn is used then the token returned by acquire() should be given as an argument when calling this function.

Contributing

1. Fork this repository to your own GitHub account and then clone it to your local device
2. Move into the directory of the clone: cd async-sema
3. Link it to the global module directory of Node.js: npm link

Inside the project where you want to test your clone of the package, you can now either use npm link async-sema to link the clone to the local dependencies.

Author

Olli Vanhoja (@OVanhoja) - ▲ZEIT