High Performance Timer for .NET

HashedWheelTimer implemented in C# inspired by io.netty.util.HashedWheelTimer

What is Hashed Wheel Timer?

It is a timer based on George Varghese and Tony Lauck's paper, Hashed and Hierarchical Timing Wheels: data structures to efficiently implement a timer facility.

The concept on the Timer Wheel is rather simple to understand: in order to keep track of events on given resolution, an array of linked lists (alternatively - sets or even arrays, YMMV) is preallocated. When event is scheduled, it's address is found by dividing deadline time t by resolution and wheel size. The registration is then assigned with rounds (how many times we should go around the wheel in order for the time period to be elapsed).

For each scheduled resolution, a bucket is created. There are wheel size buckets, each one of which is holding Registrations. Timer is going through each bucket from the first until the next one, and decrements rounds for each registration. As soon as registration's rounds is reaching 0, the timeout is triggered. After that it is either rescheduled (with same offset and amount of rounds as initially) or removed from timer.

Hashed Wheel is often called approximated timer, since it acts on the certain resolution, which allows it's optimisations. All the tasks scheduled for the timer period lower than the resolution or "between" resolution steps will be rounded to the "ceiling" (for example, given resolution 10 milliseconds, all the tasks for 5,6,7 etc milliseconds will first fire after 10, and 15, 16, 17 will first trigger after 20).

If you're a visual person, it might be useful for you to check out these slides, which help to understand the concept underlying the Hashed Wheel Timer better.

Why another Timer?

The .NET Framework and .NET Core already provide a set of timers

• System.Timers.Timer
• System.Threading.Timer
• System.Windows.Forms.Timer
• System.Web.UI.Timer
• System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherTimer

HashedWheelTimer is different as it is optimized for approximated I/O timeout scheduling. It provides O(1) time complexity and cheap constant factors for the important operations of inserting or removing timers.

Imagine a scenario, there are ten thousands of TCP connections and each of them has its own timer for rate limit or other functionalities. In this case HashedWheelTimer is a better choice.

Installation

The package is available from NuGet

Install-Package HashedWheelTimer

How to Use

First create an instance of HashedWheelTimer class.

Note that, each HashedWheelTimer instance creates a dedicated thread to watch the wheel. Hence, it is strong recommanded to reuse HashedWheelTimer instance as much as possible.

using HWT;

HashedWheelTimer timer = new HashedWheelTimer( tickDuration: TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1)
                , ticksPerWheel: 100000
                , maxPendingTimeouts: 0);

The constructor accepts the parameters below.

• tickDuration As described with 'approximated', this timer does not execute the scheduled TimerTask on time. HashedWheelTimer, on every tick, will check if there are any TimerTasks behind the schedule and execute them. You can increase or decrease the accuracy of the execution timing by specifying smaller or larger tick duration in the constructor. In most network applications, I/O timeout does not need to be accurate.
• ticksPerWheel HashedWheelTimer maintains a data structure called 'wheel'. To put simply, a wheel is a hash table of TimerTasks whose hash function is 'dead line of the task'. The default number of ticks per wheel (i.e. the size of the wheel) is 512. You could specify a larger value if you are going to schedule a lot of timeouts.
• maxPendingTimeouts The maximum number of pending timeouts after which call to NewTimeout() will result in InvalidOperationException being thrown. No maximum pending timeouts limit is assumed if this value is 0 or negative.

Next, create a new class implementing TimerTask interface

class MyTimerTask : TimerTask
{
    // This method is called when the task is expired.
    // It is fired via `Task.Run`, hence you'd better surround the code with try-catch
    public void Run(Timeout timeout)
    {
        try
        {
            // ...
        } catch(Exception){
            // ...
        }
    }
}

Now we can schedual the task in 5 seconds later.

timer.NewTimeout(new MyTimerTask(), TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5));

Note that all the methods are thread-safe. You don't need synchronization on accessing them.

If you are using TPL(Task Parallel Library) asynchronous programming, you may already use await Task.Delay(milliseconds) to continue some work after a while. Alternatively, it can be replaced with following code if approximated delay is acceptable.

await timer.Delay(milliseconds)

A full example

/// <summary>
/// Task fired repeatedly
/// </summary>
class IntervalTimerTask : TimerTask
{
    public void Run(Timeout timeout)
    {
        Console.WriteLine($"IntervalTimerTask is fired at {DateTime.UtcNow.Ticks / 10000000L}");
        timeout.Timer.NewTimeout(this, TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2));
    }
}

/// <summary>
/// Task only be fired for one time
/// </summary>
class OneTimeTask : TimerTask
{
    readonly string _userData;
    public OneTimeTask(string data)
    {
        _userData = data;
    }

    public void Run(Timeout timeout)
    {
        Console.WriteLine($"{_userData} is fired at {DateTime.UtcNow.Ticks / 10000000L}");
    }
}


static void Main(string[] args)
{
    HashedWheelTimer timer = new HashedWheelTimer( tickDuration: TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1)
        , ticksPerWheel: 100000
        , maxPendingTimeouts: 0);

    timer.NewTimeout(new OneTimeTask("A"), TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5));
    timer.NewTimeout(new OneTimeTask("B"), TimeSpan.FromSeconds(4));
    var timeout = timer.NewTimeout(new OneTimeTask("C"), TimeSpan.FromSeconds(3));
    timer.NewTimeout(new OneTimeTask("D"), TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2));
    timer.NewTimeout(new OneTimeTask("E"), TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1));

    timeout.Cancel();

    timer.NewTimeout(new IntervalTimerTask(), TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5));
    Console.WriteLine($"{DateTime.UtcNow.Ticks / 10000000L} : Started");
    Console.ReadKey();
}

The output of the sample is something like