Scala (20) — Execution Context

Execution Context:

• An ExecutionContext is similar to an Executor: it is free to execute computations in a new thread, in a pooled thread or in the current thread (although executing the computation in the current thread is discouraged)

The Global Execution Context:

• ExecutionContext.global is an ExecutionContext backed by a ForkJoinPool. It should be sufficient for most situations but requires some care.
  A ForkJoinPool manages a limited amount of threads (the maximum amount of thread being referred to as parallelism level). The number of concurrently blocking computations can exceed the parallelism level only if each blocking call is wrapped inside a blocking call. Otherwise, there is a risk that the thread pool in the global execution context is starved, and no computation can process.
• By default, the ExecutionContext.global sets the parallelism level of its underlying fork-join-pool to the amount of available processors (Runtime.availableProcessors). This configuration can be overridden by setting the following VM attributes: scala.concurrent.context.minThreads, scala.concurrent.context.numThreads, scala.concurrent.context.maxThreads.

Thread Pool:

• If each incoming request results in a multitude of requests to get another tier of systems, in these systems, thread pools must be managed so that they are balanced according to the ratios of requests in each tier: mismanagement of one thread pool bleeds into another.