Spring Integration - Concurrent Service Activators

Question

I have a queue channel, and a service activator with a poller which reads from that queue. I'd like to have configuration to say "I want 50 threads to poll that queue, and each time you poll and get a message back, on this thread, invoke the service the service-activator points to."

The service has no @Async annotations, but is stateless and safe to run in a concurrent fashion.

Will the below do that? Are there other preferred ways of achieving this?

<int:channel id="titles">
    <int:queue/>
</int:channel>

<int:service-activator output-channel="resolvedIds" ref="searchService" method="searchOnTitle" input-channel="titles">
    <int:poller fixed-delay="100" time-unit="MILLISECONDS" task-executor="taskExecutor"></int:poller>
</int:service-activator>

<task:executor id="taskExecutor" pool-size="50" keep-alive="120" />

Answer 1

Yes I think it does what you want. Once you introduce a QueueChannel the interaction becomes async - you don't need @Async. If you don't explicitly set up a poller it will use the default poller.

What you have outlined is the best way to achieve it. You might also consider putting a limit on the queue size - so that in case there is a lag in keeping up with the producer it doesn't lead to out of memory issue. If a size is specified then the send calls on the channel will block - acting as a throttle.

The configuration you have will work as you expect. The only issue is that once you start creating executors and pollers for each end point it becomes difficult to figure out the optimal configuration for the entire application. It is ok to do this kind of optimization for a few specific steps - but not for all the endpoints (nothing in you questions suggests that you are doing it, just thought that I will raise it anyway.