Use cases for RxJava schedulers

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Great questions, I think the documentation could do with some more detail.

  1. io() is backed by an unbounded thread-pool and is the sort of thing you’d use for non-computationally intensive tasks, that is stuff that doesn’t put much load on the CPU. So yep interaction with the file system, interaction with databases or services on a different host are good examples.
  2. computation() is backed by a bounded thread-pool with size equal to the number of available processors. If you tried to schedule CPU intensive work in parallel across more than the available processors (say using newThread()) then you are up for thread creation overhead and context switching overhead as threads vie for a processor and it’s potentially a big performance hit.
  3. It’s best to leave computation() for CPU intensive work only otherwise you won’t get good CPU utilization.
  4. It’s bad to call io() for computational work for the reason discussed in 2. io() is unbounded and if you schedule a thousand computational tasks on io() in parallel then each of those thousand tasks will each have their own thread and be competing for CPU incurring context switching costs.

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