Producer/Consumer Pattern

• The Producer/Consumer problem is a classic Concurrent programming problem.

• The Producer/Consumer Design Pattern is the standard, pattern-based design to solve these types of problem.

• The idea is that the Producer produces "something" (as output) and the Consumer(s) process or consumes the "something" (as input).

• The Producer has no knowledge of when or if the Consumer(s) exists, just that it will produce "something".

• The Consumer(s) have no knowledge of the Producer, all they know is that when the "something" is there, they want it.

• They also have no knowledge of other Consumers.

• Only one Consumer will consume each output from the Producer.

• The overriding limitation is that the Producer will not overproduce and the Consumer will not consume things that don't exist.

• The Producer and Consumer(s) are coded as separate threads (Concurrency!)

• Let's look at the Consumer and Producer code in downloads/multithreading.

References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Producer%E2%80%93consumer_problem