limitedParallelism

open override fun limitedParallelism(parallelism: Int): CoroutineDispatcher(source)

Creates a view of the current dispatcher that limits the parallelism to the given value. The resulting view uses the original dispatcher for execution, but with the guarantee that no more than parallelism coroutines are executed at the same time.

This method does not impose restrictions on the number of views or the total sum of parallelism values, each view controls its own parallelism independently with the guarantee that the effective parallelism of all views cannot exceed the actual parallelism of the original dispatcher.

Limitations

The default implementation of limitedParallelism does not support direct dispatchers, such as executing the given runnable in place during dispatch calls. Any dispatcher that may return false from isDispatchNeeded is considered direct. For direct dispatchers, it is recommended to override this method and provide a domain-specific implementation or to throw an UnsupportedOperationException.

Example of usage

private val backgroundDispatcher = newFixedThreadPoolContext(4, "App Background")
// At most 2 threads will be processing images as it is really slow and CPU-intensive
private val imageProcessingDispatcher = backgroundDispatcher.limitedParallelism(2)
// At most 3 threads will be processing JSON to avoid image processing starvation
private val jsonProcessingDispatcher = backgroundDispatcher.limitedParallelism(3)
// At most 1 thread will be doing IO
private val fileWriterDispatcher = backgroundDispatcher.limitedParallelism(1)

Note how in this example the application has an executor with 4 threads, but the total sum of all limits is 6. Still, at most 4 coroutines can be executed simultaneously as each view limits only its own parallelism.

Note that this example was structured in such a way that it illustrates the parallelism guarantees. In practice, it is usually better to use Dispatchers.IO or Dispatchers.Default instead of creating a backgroundDispatcher. It is both possible and advised to call limitedParallelism on them.