Worker Pool

2 min read

The Worker Pool offloads heavy computations from the main thread for smooth UI.

Overview

PinePaper uses Web Workers for:

  • Poisson disk sampling
  • Golden ratio distribution
  • Path simplification
  • Color calculations
  • Scene serialization

Availability

if (app.workerPool.isAvailable()) {
  // Workers ready
}

Async Methods

Poisson Disk Sampling

const points = await app.workerPool.poissonDiskSampling(
  800,  // width
  600,  // height
  50    // minimum distance
);
// Returns: [{ x, y }, ...]

Golden Ratio Distribution

const points = await app.workerPool.goldenRatioDistribution(
  100,  // count
  800,  // width
  600   // height
);

Path Simplification

const simplified = await app.workerPool.simplifyPath(
  points,     // array of {x, y}
  5           // tolerance
);

Color Calculations

const colors = await app.workerPool.calculateColors(
  positions,  // array of {x, y}
  palette,    // color array
  0.01        // noise scale
);

Scene Serialization

// Serialize (for saving)
const json = await app.workerPool.serializeScene(sceneData);

// Deserialize (for loading)
const scene = await app.workerPool.deserializeScene(jsonString);

Performance

Statistics

const stats = app.workerPool.getStats();
// {
//   tasksCompleted: 42,
//   tasksFailed: 0,
//   averageTaskTime: 12.5,
//   workersActive: 2
// }

Warm Up

Pre-initialize workers for faster first use:

await app.workerPool.warmUp();

Configuration

const pool = new WorkerPool({
  maxWorkers: navigator.hardwareConcurrency || 4,
  timeout: 30000  // 30 seconds
});

Fallback

If Workers are unavailable, methods fall back to main thread execution automatically.

Need more processing power? Web Workers help, but they’re still limited by your device’s hardware. For computationally intensive operations (large scenes, complex generators, batch processing), request server-side processing. We’re considering a paid API for heavy workloads based on user demand.

Best Practices

  1. Use for operations taking >16ms
  2. Batch multiple calculations when possible
  3. Use warmUp() during app initialization
  4. Check isAvailable() before relying on workers