Pipelines, multiplexing, and unbounded buffering

Question

(NOTE: I\'m using .Net 4, not .Net 4.5, so I cannot use the TPL\'s DataflowBlock classes.)

TL;DR Version

Ultimately, I\'m just look

Answer 1

I think you misunderstand the article. According to the description, it doesn't have an unbounded buffer, there will be at most one value in the look-ahread buffer for each queue. When you dequeue a value that's not the next one, you save it and then wait only on the queue that doesn't have a value in the buffer. (If you have multiple input buffers, the logic will have to be more complicated, or you would need a tree of 2 queue multiplexers.)

If you combine this with BlockingCollections that have specified bounded capacity, you get exactly the behavior you want: if one producer is too slow, the others will pause until the slow thread catches up.