Package java.util.concurrent
Utility classes commonly useful in concurrent programming. This package includes a few small standardized extensible frameworks, as well as some classes that provide useful functionality and are otherwise tedious or difficult to implement. Here are brief descriptions of the main components. See also the java.util.concurrent.locks
and java.util.concurrent.atomic
packages.
Executors
Interfaces.Executor
is a simple standardized interface for defining custom thread-like subsystems, including thread pools, asynchronous I/O, and lightweight task frameworks. Depending on which concrete Executor class is being used, tasks may execute in a newly created thread, an existing task-execution thread, or the thread calling execute
, and may execute sequentially or concurrently. ExecutorService
provides a more complete asynchronous task execution framework. An ExecutorService manages queuing and scheduling of tasks, and allows controlled shutdown. The ScheduledExecutorService
subinterface and associated interfaces add support for delayed and periodic task execution. ExecutorServices provide methods arranging asynchronous execution of any function expressed as Callable
, the result-bearing analog of Runnable
. A Future
returns the results of a function, allows determination of whether execution has completed, and provides a means to cancel execution. A RunnableFuture
is a Future
that possesses a run
method that upon execution, sets its results.
Implementations. Classes ThreadPoolExecutor
and ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor
provide tunable, flexible thread pools. The Executors
class provides factory methods for the most common kinds and configurations of Executors, as well as a few utility methods for using them. Other utilities based on Executors
include the concrete class FutureTask
providing a common extensible implementation of Futures, and ExecutorCompletionService
, that assists in coordinating the processing of groups of asynchronous tasks.
Class ForkJoinPool
provides an Executor primarily designed for processing instances of ForkJoinTask
and its subclasses. These classes employ a work-stealing scheduler that attains high throughput for tasks conforming to restrictions that often hold in computation-intensive parallel processing.
Queues
TheConcurrentLinkedQueue
class supplies an efficient scalable thread-safe non-blocking FIFO queue. The ConcurrentLinkedDeque
class is similar, but additionally supports the Deque
interface. Five implementations in java.util.concurrent
support the extended BlockingQueue
interface, that defines blocking versions of put and take: LinkedBlockingQueue
, ArrayBlockingQueue
, SynchronousQueue
, PriorityBlockingQueue
, and DelayQueue
. The different classes cover the most common usage contexts for producer-consumer, messaging, parallel tasking, and related concurrent designs.
Extended interface TransferQueue
, and implementation LinkedTransferQueue
introduce a synchronous transfer
method (along with related features) in which a producer may optionally block awaiting its consumer.
The BlockingDeque
interface extends BlockingQueue
to support both FIFO and LIFO (stack-based) operations. Class LinkedBlockingDeque
provides an implementation.
Timing
TheTimeUnit
class provides multiple granularities (including nanoseconds) for specifying and controlling time-out based operations. Most classes in the package contain operations based on time-outs in addition to indefinite waits. In all cases that time-outs are used, the time-out specifies the minimum time that the method should wait before indicating that it timed-out. Implementations make a "best effort" to detect time-outs as soon as possible after they occur. However, an indefinite amount of time may elapse between a time-out being detected and a thread actually executing again after that time-out. All methods that accept timeout parameters treat values less than or equal to zero to mean not to wait at all. To wait "forever", you can use a value of Long.MAX_VALUE
. Synchronizers
Five classes aid common special-purpose synchronization idioms.-
Semaphore
is a classic concurrency tool. -
CountDownLatch
is a very simple yet very common utility for blocking until a given number of signals, events, or conditions hold. - A
CyclicBarrier
is a resettable multiway synchronization point useful in some styles of parallel programming. - A
Phaser
provides a more flexible form of barrier that may be used to control phased computation among multiple threads. - An
Exchanger
allows two threads to exchange objects at a rendezvous point, and is useful in several pipeline designs.
Concurrent Collections
Besides Queues, this package supplies Collection implementations designed for use in multithreaded contexts:ConcurrentHashMap
, ConcurrentSkipListMap
, ConcurrentSkipListSet
, CopyOnWriteArrayList
, and CopyOnWriteArraySet
. When many threads are expected to access a given collection, a ConcurrentHashMap
is normally preferable to a synchronized HashMap
, and a ConcurrentSkipListMap
is normally preferable to a synchronized TreeMap
. A CopyOnWriteArrayList
is preferable to a synchronized ArrayList
when the expected number of reads and traversals greatly outnumber the number of updates to a list. The "Concurrent" prefix used with some classes in this package is a shorthand indicating several differences from similar "synchronized" classes. For example java.util.Hashtable
and Collections.synchronizedMap(new HashMap())
are synchronized. But ConcurrentHashMap
is "concurrent". A concurrent collection is thread-safe, but not governed by a single exclusion lock. In the particular case of ConcurrentHashMap, it safely permits any number of concurrent reads as well as a large number of concurrent writes. "Synchronized" classes can be useful when you need to prevent all access to a collection via a single lock, at the expense of poorer scalability. In other cases in which multiple threads are expected to access a common collection, "concurrent" versions are normally preferable. And unsynchronized collections are preferable when either collections are unshared, or are accessible only when holding other locks.
Most concurrent Collection implementations (including most Queues) also differ from the usual java.util
conventions in that their Iterators and Spliterators provide weakly consistent rather than fast-fail traversal:
- they may proceed concurrently with other operations
- they will never throw
ConcurrentModificationException
- they are guaranteed to traverse elements as they existed upon construction exactly once, and may (but are not guaranteed to) reflect any modifications subsequent to construction.
Memory Consistency Properties
Chapter 17 of The Java™ Language Specification defines the happens-before relation on memory operations such as reads and writes of shared variables. The results of a write by one thread are guaranteed to be visible to a read by another thread only if the write operation happens-before the read operation. Thesynchronized
and volatile
constructs, as well as the Thread.start()
and Thread.join()
methods, can form happens-before relationships. In particular: - Each action in a thread happens-before every action in that thread that comes later in the program's order.
- An unlock (
synchronized
block or method exit) of a monitor happens-before every subsequent lock (synchronized
block or method entry) of that same monitor. And because the happens-before relation is transitive, all actions of a thread prior to unlocking happen-before all actions subsequent to any thread locking that monitor. - A write to a
volatile
field happens-before every subsequent read of that same field. Writes and reads ofvolatile
fields have similar memory consistency effects as entering and exiting monitors, but do not entail mutual exclusion locking. - A call to
start
on a thread happens-before any action in the started thread. - All actions in a thread happen-before any other thread successfully returns from a
join
on that thread.
java.util.concurrent
and its subpackages extend these guarantees to higher-level synchronization. In particular: - Actions in a thread prior to placing an object into any concurrent collection happen-before actions subsequent to the access or removal of that element from the collection in another thread.
- Actions in a thread prior to the submission of a
Runnable
to anExecutor
happen-before its execution begins. Similarly forCallables
submitted to anExecutorService
. - Actions taken by the asynchronous computation represented by a
Future
happen-before actions subsequent to the retrieval of the result viaFuture.get()
in another thread. - Actions prior to "releasing" synchronizer methods such as
Lock.unlock
,Semaphore.release
, andCountDownLatch.countDown
happen-before actions subsequent to a successful "acquiring" method such asLock.lock
,Semaphore.acquire
,Condition.await
, andCountDownLatch.await
on the same synchronizer object in another thread. - For each pair of threads that successfully exchange objects via an
Exchanger
, actions prior to theexchange()
in each thread happen-before those subsequent to the correspondingexchange()
in another thread. - Actions prior to calling
CyclicBarrier.await
andPhaser.awaitAdvance
(as well as its variants) happen-before actions performed by the barrier action, and actions performed by the barrier action happen-before actions subsequent to a successful return from the correspondingawait
in other threads.
- Since:
- 1.5
Interface | Description |
---|---|
BlockingDeque<E> | A |
BlockingQueue<E> | A |
Callable<V> | A task that returns a result and may throw an exception. |
CompletableFuture.AsynchronousCompletionTask | A marker interface identifying asynchronous tasks produced by |
CompletionService<V> | A service that decouples the production of new asynchronous tasks from the consumption of the results of completed tasks. |
CompletionStage<T> | A stage of a possibly asynchronous computation, that performs an action or computes a value when another CompletionStage completes. |
ConcurrentMap<K,V> | A |
ConcurrentNavigableMap<K,V> | A |
Delayed | A mix-in style interface for marking objects that should be acted upon after a given delay. |
Executor | An object that executes submitted |
ExecutorService | An |
Flow.Processor<T,R> | A component that acts as both a Subscriber and Publisher. |
Flow.Publisher<T> | A producer of items (and related control messages) received by Subscribers. |
Flow.Subscriber<T> | A receiver of messages. |
Flow.Subscription | Message control linking a |
ForkJoinPool.ForkJoinWorkerThreadFactory | Factory for creating new |
ForkJoinPool.ManagedBlocker | Interface for extending managed parallelism for tasks running in |
Future<V> | A |
RejectedExecutionHandler | A handler for tasks that cannot be executed by a |
RunnableFuture<V> | |
RunnableScheduledFuture<V> | A |
ScheduledExecutorService | An |
ScheduledFuture<V> | A delayed result-bearing action that can be cancelled. |
ThreadFactory | An object that creates new threads on demand. |
TransferQueue<E> | A |
Class | Description |
---|---|
AbstractExecutorService | Provides default implementations of |
ArrayBlockingQueue<E> | A bounded blocking queue backed by an array. |
CompletableFuture<T> | A |
ConcurrentHashMap<K,V> | A hash table supporting full concurrency of retrievals and high expected concurrency for updates. |
ConcurrentHashMap.KeySetView<K,V> | A view of a ConcurrentHashMap as a |
ConcurrentLinkedDeque<E> | An unbounded concurrent deque based on linked nodes. |
ConcurrentLinkedQueue<E> | An unbounded thread-safe queue based on linked nodes. |
ConcurrentSkipListMap<K,V> | A scalable concurrent |
ConcurrentSkipListSet<E> | A scalable concurrent |
CopyOnWriteArrayList<E> | A thread-safe variant of |
CopyOnWriteArraySet<E> | A |
CountDownLatch | A synchronization aid that allows one or more threads to wait until a set of operations being performed in other threads completes. |
CountedCompleter<T> | A |
CyclicBarrier | A synchronization aid that allows a set of threads to all wait for each other to reach a common barrier point. |
DelayQueue<E extends Delayed> | An unbounded blocking queue of |
Exchanger<V> | A synchronization point at which threads can pair and swap elements within pairs. |
ExecutorCompletionService<V> | A |
Executors | Factory and utility methods for |
Flow | Interrelated interfaces and static methods for establishing flow-controlled components in which |
ForkJoinPool | An |
ForkJoinTask<V> | Abstract base class for tasks that run within a |
ForkJoinWorkerThread | A thread managed by a |
FutureTask<V> | A cancellable asynchronous computation. |
LinkedBlockingDeque<E> | An optionally-bounded blocking deque based on linked nodes. |
LinkedBlockingQueue<E> | An optionally-bounded blocking queue based on linked nodes. |
LinkedTransferQueue<E> | An unbounded |
Phaser | A reusable synchronization barrier, similar in functionality to |
PriorityBlockingQueue<E> | An unbounded blocking queue that uses the same ordering rules as class |
RecursiveAction | A recursive resultless |
RecursiveTask<V> | A recursive result-bearing |
ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor | A |
Semaphore | A counting semaphore. |
SubmissionPublisher<T> | A |
SynchronousQueue<E> | A blocking queue in which each insert operation must wait for a corresponding remove operation by another thread, and vice versa. |
ThreadLocalRandom | A random number generator isolated to the current thread. |
ThreadPoolExecutor | An |
ThreadPoolExecutor.AbortPolicy | A handler for rejected tasks that throws a |
ThreadPoolExecutor.CallerRunsPolicy | A handler for rejected tasks that runs the rejected task directly in the calling thread of the |
ThreadPoolExecutor.DiscardOldestPolicy | A handler for rejected tasks that discards the oldest unhandled request and then retries |
ThreadPoolExecutor.DiscardPolicy | A handler for rejected tasks that silently discards the rejected task. |
Enum | Description |
---|---|
TimeUnit | A |
Exception | Description |
---|---|
BrokenBarrierException | Exception thrown when a thread tries to wait upon a barrier that is in a broken state, or which enters the broken state while the thread is waiting. |
CancellationException | Exception indicating that the result of a value-producing task, such as a |
CompletionException | Exception thrown when an error or other exception is encountered in the course of completing a result or task. |
ExecutionException | Exception thrown when attempting to retrieve the result of a task that aborted by throwing an exception. |
RejectedExecutionException | Exception thrown by an |
TimeoutException | Exception thrown when a blocking operation times out. |