what can create huge overhead of goroutines?

for an assignment we are using go and one of the things we are going to do is to parse a uniprotdatabasefile line-by-line to collect uniprot-records.

I prefer not to share too much code, but I have a working code snippet that does parse such a file (2.5 GB) correctly in 48 s (measured using the time go-package). It parses the file iteratively and add lines to a record until a record end signal is reached (a full record), and metadata on the record is created. Then the record string is nulled, and a new record is collected line-by-line. Then I thought that I would try to use go-routines.

I have got some tips before from stackoverflow, and then to the original code I simple added a function to handle everything concerning the metadata-creation.

So, the code is doing

1. create an empty record,
2. iterate the file and add lines to the record,
3. if a record stop signal is found (now we have a full record) - give it to a go routine to create the metadata
4. null the record string and continue from 2).

I also added a sync.WaitGroup() to make sure that I waited (in the end) for each routine to finish. I thought that this would actually lower the time spent on parsing the databasefile as it continued to parse while the goroutines would act on each record. However, the code seems to run for more than 20 minutes indicating that something is wrong or the overhead went crazy. Any suggestions?

package main
import (
"bufio"
"crypto/sha1"
"fmt"
"io"
"log"
"os"
"strings"
"sync"
"time"
)
type producer struct {
parser uniprot
}
type unit struct {
tag string
}
type uniprot struct {
filenames     []string
recordUnits   chan unit
recordStrings map[string]string
}
func main() {
p := producer{parser: uniprot{}}
p.parser.recordUnits = make(chan unit, 1000000)
p.parser.recordStrings = make(map[string]string)
p.parser.collectRecords(os.Args[1])
}
func (u *uniprot) collectRecords(name string) {
fmt.Println("file to open ", name)
t0 := time.Now()
wg := new(sync.WaitGroup)
record := []string{}
file, err := os.Open(name)
errorCheck(err)
scanner := bufio.NewScanner(file)
for scanner.Scan() { //Scan the file
retText := scanner.Text()
if strings.HasPrefix(retText, "//") {
wg.Add(1)
go u.handleRecord(record, wg)
record = []string{}
} else {
record = append(record, retText)
}
}
file.Close()
wg.Wait()
t1 := time.Now()
fmt.Println(t1.Sub(t0))
}
func (u *uniprot) handleRecord(record []string, wg *sync.WaitGroup) {
defer wg.Done()
recString := strings.Join(record, "\n")
t := hashfunc(recString)
u.recordUnits <- unit{tag: t}
u.recordStrings[t] = recString
}
func hashfunc(record string) (hashtag string) {
hash := sha1.New()
io.WriteString(hash, record)
hashtag = string(hash.Sum(nil))
return
}
func errorCheck(err error) {
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
}

First of all: your code is not thread-safe. Mainly because you're accessing a hashmap
concurrently. These are not safe for concurrency in go and need to be locked. Faulty line in your code:

u.recordStrings[t] = recString

As this will blow up when you're running go with GOMAXPROCS > 1, I'm assuming that you're not doing that. Make sure you're running your application with GOMAXPROCS=2 or higher to achieve parallelism.
The default value is 1, therefore your code runs on one single OS thread which, of course, can't be scheduled on two CPU or CPU cores simultaneously. Example:

$ GOMAXPROCS=2 go run udb.go uniprot_sprot_viruses.dat

At last: pull the values from the channel or otherwise your program will not terminate.
You're creating a deadlock if the number of goroutines exceeds your limit. I tested with a
76MiB file of data, you said your file was about 2.5GB. I have 16347 entries. Assuming linear growth,
your file will exceed 1e6 and therefore there are not enough slots in the channel and your program
will deadlock, giving no result while accumulating goroutines which don't run to fail at the end
(miserably).

So the solution should be to add a go routine which pulls the values from the channel and does
something with them.

As a side note: If you're worried about performance, do not use strings as they're always copied. Use []byte instead.