Distributed Computing with Go

Controlling parallelism

We know that spawned goroutines will start executing as soon as possible and in a simultaneous fashion. However, there is an inherent risk involved when the said goroutines need to work on a common source that has a lower limit on the number of simultaneous tasks it can handle. This might cause the common source to significantly slow down or in some cases even fail. As you might guess, this is not a new problem in the field of computer science, and there are many ways to handle it. As we shall see throughout the chapter, Go provides mechanisms to control parallelism in a simple and intuitive fashion. Let's start by looking at an example to simulate the problem of burdened common source, and then proceed to solve it. ...