Concurrent Collections

Concurrent Collections

Java 5.0 improves on the synchronized collections by providing several concurrent collection classes. Synchronized collections achieve their thread safety by serializing all access to the collection's state. The cost of this approach is poor concurrency; when multiple threads contend for the collection-wide lock, throughput suffers.

The concurrent collections, on the other hand, are designed for concurrent access from multiple threads. Java 5.0 adds ConcurrentHashMap, a replacement for synchronized hash-based Map implementations, and CopyOnWriteArrayList, a replacement for synchronized List implementations for cases where traversal is the dominant operation. The new ConcurrentMap interface adds support for common compound actions such as put-if-absent, replace, and conditional remove.

Replacing synchronized collections with concurrent collections can offer dramatic scalability improvements with little risk.

Java 5.0 also adds two new collection types, Queue and BlockingQueue. A Queue is intended to hold a set of elements temporarily while they await processing. Several implementations are provided, including ConcurrentLinkedQueue, a traditional FIFO queue, and PriorityQueue, a (non concurrent) priority ordered queue. Queue operations do not block; if the queue is empty, the retrieval operation returns null. While you can simulate the behavior of a Queue with a Listin fact, LinkedList also implements Queuethe Queue classes were added because eliminating the random-access requirements of List admits more efficient concurrent implementations.

BlockingQueue extends Queue to add blocking insertion and retrieval operations. If the queue is empty, a retrieval blocks until an element is available, and if the queue is full (for bounded queues) an insertion blocks until there is space available. Blocking queues are extremely useful in producer-consumer designs, and are covered in greater detail in Section 5.3.

Just as ConcurrentHashMap is a concurrent replacement for a synchronized hash-based Map, Java 6 adds ConcurrentSkipListMap and ConcurrentSkipListSet, which are concurrent replacements for a synchronized SortedMap or SortedSet (such as treeMap or TReeSet wrapped with synchronizedMap).