Multiple timer ticks with rust tokio

Sometimes you have to manage multiple timer ticks to execute actions in your program. A solution would be to spawn a task for every interval you need and await a interval future.

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() {
    
    let mut interval1 = tokio::time::interval(std::time::Duration::from_secs(2));
    let mut interval2 = tokio::time::interval(std::time::Duration::from_secs(5));

    tokio::spawn(async move {
        loop {
            interval1.tick().await;
            println!("tick 1");
        }
    });

    tokio::spawn(async move {
        loop {
            interval2.tick().await;
            println!("tick 2");
        }
    });

    loop {
       // do something to not block the whole CPU 
    }

}

Maybe you have seen the tokio::select! marco. Use it to poll many futures to do their work. This makes it possible for us to progress many futures in one single task.

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() {
    
    let mut interval1 = tokio::time::interval(std::time::Duration::from_secs(2));
    let mut interval2 = tokio::time::interval(std::time::Duration::from_secs(5));

    loop {
        tokio::select! {
            _ = interval1.tick() => {
                println!("tick 1");
            }
            _ = interval2.tick() => {
                println!("tick 2");
            }
        }
    }

}