publishOn vs subscribeOn in Project Reactor 3

It took me sometime to understand it, maybe because publishOn is usually explained before subscribeOn, here’s a hopefully more simple layman explanation.

subscribeOn means running the initial source emission e.g subscribe(), onSubscribe() and request() on a specified scheduler worker (other thread), and also the same for any subsequent operations like for example onNext/onError/onComplete, map etc and no matter the position of subscribeOn(), this behavior would happen

And if you didn’t do any publishOn in the fluent calls then that’s it, everything would run on such thread.

But as soon as you call publishOn() let’s say in the middle, then any subsequent operator call will be run on the supplied scheduler worker to such publishOn().

here’s an example

Consumer<Integer> consumer = s -> System.out.println(s + " : " + Thread.currentThread().getName());

Flux.range(1, 5)
        .doOnNext(consumer)
        .map(i -> {
          System.out.println("Inside map the thread is " + Thread.currentThread().getName());
          return i * 10;
        })
        .publishOn(Schedulers.newElastic("First_PublishOn()_thread"))
        .doOnNext(consumer)
        .publishOn(Schedulers.newElastic("Second_PublishOn()_thread"))
        .doOnNext(consumer)
        .subscribeOn(Schedulers.newElastic("subscribeOn_thread"))
        .subscribe();

The result would be

1 : subscribeOn_thread-4
Inside map the thread is subscribeOn_thread-4
2 : subscribeOn_thread-4
Inside map the thread is subscribeOn_thread-4
10 : First_PublishOn()_thread-6
3 : subscribeOn_thread-4
Inside map the thread is subscribeOn_thread-4
20 : First_PublishOn()_thread-6
4 : subscribeOn_thread-4
10 : Second_PublishOn()_thread-5
30 : First_PublishOn()_thread-6
20 : Second_PublishOn()_thread-5
Inside map the thread is subscribeOn_thread-4
30 : Second_PublishOn()_thread-5
5 : subscribeOn_thread-4
40 : First_PublishOn()_thread-6
Inside map the thread is subscribeOn_thread-4
40 : Second_PublishOn()_thread-5
50 : First_PublishOn()_thread-6
50 : Second_PublishOn()_thread-5

As you can see the first doOnNext() and the following map() is running on the thread called subscribeOn_thread , that happens till any publishOn() called, then any subsequent call would run on the supplied scheduler to that publishOn() and again this will happen for any subsequent call till anyone calls another publishOn().