NAME

AnyEvent::FAQ - frequently asked questions

The newest version of this document can be found at http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/AnyEvent/lib/AnyEvent/FAQ.pod.

My program exits before doing anything, what's going on?

Programmers new to event-based programming often forget that you can actually do other stuff while "waiting" for an event to occur and therefore forget to actually wait when they do not, in fact, have anything else to do.

Here is an example:

   use AnyEvent;

   my $timer = AnyEvent->timer (after => 5, cb => sub { say "hi" });

The expectation might be for the program to print "hi" after 5 seconds and then probably to exit. However, if you run this, your program will exit almost instantly: Creating the timer does not wait for it, instead the timer method returns immediately and perl executes the rest of the program. But there is nothing left to execute, so perl exits.

To force AnyEvent to wait for something, use a condvar:

   use AnyEvent;

   my $quit_program = AnyEvent->condvar;
   my $timer = AnyEvent->timer (after => 5, cb => sub { $quit_program->send });

   $quit_program->recv;

Here the program doesn't immediately exit, because it first waits for the "quit_program" condition.

In most cases, your main program should call the event library "loop" function directly:

   use EV;
   use AnyEvent;

   ...

   EV::loop;

Why is my tcp_connect callback never called?

Tricky: tcp_connect (and a few other functions in AnyEvent::Socket) is critically sensitive to the caller context.

In void context, it will just do it's thing and eventually call the callback. In any other context, however, it will return a special "guard" object - when it is destroyed (e.g. when you don't store it but throw it away), tcp_connect will no longer try to connect or call any callbacks.

Often this happens when the tcp_connect call is at the end of a function:

   sub do_connect {
      tcp_connect "www.example.com", 80, sub {
         ... lengthy code
      };
   }

Then the caller decides whether there is a void context or not. One can avoid these cases by explicitly returning nothing:

   sub do_connect {
      tcp_connect "www.example.com", 80, sub {
         ... lengthy code
      };

      () # return nothing
   }

Why do some backends use a lot of CPU in AE::cv->recv?

Many people try out this simple program, or it's equivalent:

   AnyEvent->condvar->recv;

They are then shocked to see that this basically idles with the Perl backend, but uses 100% CPU with the EV backend, which is supposed to be sooo efficient.

The key to understand this is to understand that the above program is actually buggy: Nothing calls ->send on the condvar, ever. Worse, there are no event watchers whatsoever. Basically, it creates a deadlock: there is no way to make progress.

Some backends handle this by freezing, some by idling, and some do a 100% cpu loop.

Since this program is nonsensical (and behaves as documented with all backends, as AnyEvent makes no CPU tikme guarantees), this shouldn't be a big deal - as soon as your program actually implements something sensible, CPU usage will be normal.

Authors

Marc Lehmann <schmorp@schmorp.de>.