RxJava Fetching Observables In Parallel-open source projects ReactiveX/RxJava

The parallel operator proved to be a problem for almost all use cases and does not do what most expect from it, so it was removed in the 1.0.0.rc.4 release: https://github.com/ReactiveX/RxJava/pull/1716

A good example of how to do this type of behavior and get parallel execution can be seen here.

In your example code it is unclear if searchServiceClient is synchronous or asynchronous. It affects how to solve the problem slightly as if it is already async no extra scheduling is needed. If synchronous extra scheduling is needed.

First here are some simple examples showing synchronous and asynchronous behavior:

import rx.Observable;
import rx.Subscriber;
import rx.schedulers.Schedulers;

public class ParallelExecution {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("------------ mergingAsync");
        mergingAsync();
        System.out.println("------------ mergingSync");
        mergingSync();
        System.out.println("------------ mergingSyncMadeAsync");
        mergingSyncMadeAsync();
        System.out.println("------------ flatMapExampleSync");
        flatMapExampleSync();
        System.out.println("------------ flatMapExampleAsync");
        flatMapExampleAsync();
        System.out.println("------------");
    }

    private static void mergingAsync() {
        Observable.merge(getDataAsync(1), getDataAsync(2)).toBlocking().forEach(System.out::println);
    }

    private static void mergingSync() {
        // here you'll see the delay as each is executed synchronously
        Observable.merge(getDataSync(1), getDataSync(2)).toBlocking().forEach(System.out::println);
    }

    private static void mergingSyncMadeAsync() {
        // if you have something synchronous and want to make it async, you can schedule it like this
        // so here we see both executed concurrently
        Observable.merge(getDataSync(1).subscribeOn(Schedulers.io()), getDataSync(2).subscribeOn(Schedulers.io())).toBlocking().forEach(System.out::println);
    }

    private static void flatMapExampleAsync() {
        Observable.range(0, 5).flatMap(i -> {
            return getDataAsync(i);
        }).toBlocking().forEach(System.out::println);
    }

    private static void flatMapExampleSync() {
        Observable.range(0, 5).flatMap(i -> {
            return getDataSync(i);
        }).toBlocking().forEach(System.out::println);
    }

    // artificial representations of IO work
    static Observable getDataAsync(int i) {
        return getDataSync(i).subscribeOn(Schedulers.io());
    }

    static Observable getDataSync(int i) {
        return Observable.create((Subscriber