A "main" ForkJoinTask begins execution when it is explicitly submitted to a ForkJoinPool, or, if not already engaged in a ForkJoin computation, commenced in the ForkJoinPool.commonPool() via fork(), invoke(), or related methods. Once started, it will usually in turn start other subtasks. As indicated by the name of this class, many programs using ForkJoinTask employ only methods fork() and join(), or derivatives such as invokeAll. However, this class also provides a number of other methods that can come into play in advanced usages, as well as extension mechanics that allow support of new forms of fork/join processing.

A ForkJoinTask is a lightweight form of Future. The efficiency of ForkJoinTasks stems from a set of restrictions (that are only partially statically enforceable) reflecting their main use as computational tasks calculating pure functions or operating on purely isolated objects. The primary coordination mechanisms are fork(), that arranges asynchronous execution, and join(), that doesn't proceed until the task's result has been computed. Computations should ideally avoid synchronized methods or blocks, and should minimize other blocking synchronization apart from joining other tasks or using synchronizers such as Phasers that are advertised to cooperate with fork/join scheduling. Subdividable tasks should also not perform blocking I/O, and should ideally access variables that are completely independent of those accessed by other running tasks. These guidelines are loosely enforced by not permitting checked exceptions such as IOExceptions to be thrown. However, computations may still encounter unchecked exceptions, that are rethrown to callers attempting to join them. These exceptions may additionally include RejectedExecutionException stemming from internal resource exhaustion, such as failure to allocate internal task queues. Rethrown exceptions behave in the same way as regular exceptions, but, when possible, contain stack traces (as displayed for example using ex.printStackTrace()) of both the thread that initiated the computation as well as the thread actually encountering the exception; minimally only the latter.

It is possible to define and use ForkJoinTasks that may block, but doing so requires three further considerations: (1) Completion of few if any other tasks should be dependent on a task that blocks on external synchronization or I/O. Event-style async tasks that are never joined (for example, those subclassing CountedCompleter) often fall into this category. (2) To minimize resource impact, tasks should be small; ideally performing only the (possibly) blocking action. (3) Unless the ForkJoinPool.ManagedBlocker API is used, or the number of possibly blocked tasks is known to be less than the pool's ForkJoinPool.getParallelism() level, the pool cannot guarantee that enough threads will be available to ensure progress or good performance.

The primary method for awaiting completion and extracting results of a task is join(), but there are several variants: The Future.get() methods support interruptible and/or timed waits for completion and report results using Future conventions. Method invoke() is semantically equivalent to fork(); join() but always attempts to begin execution in the current thread. The "quiet" forms of these methods do not extract results or report exceptions. These may be useful when a set of tasks are being executed, and you need to delay processing of results or exceptions until all complete. Method invokeAll (available in multiple versions) performs the most common form of parallel invocation: forking a set of tasks and joining them all.

In the most typical usages, a fork-join pair act like a call (fork) and return (join) from a parallel recursive function. As is the case with other forms of recursive calls, returns (joins) should be performed innermost-first. For example, a.fork(); b.fork(); b.join(); a.join(); is likely to be substantially more efficient than joining a before b.

The execution status of tasks may be queried at several levels of detail: isDone() is true if a task completed in any way (including the case where a task was cancelled without executing); isCompletedNormally() is true if a task completed without cancellation or encountering an exception; isCancelled() is true if the task was cancelled (in which case getException(int) returns a CancellationException); and isCompletedAbnormally() is true if a task was either cancelled or encountered an exception, in which case getException(int) will return either the encountered exception or CancellationException.

The ForkJoinTask class is not usually directly subclassed. Instead, you subclass one of the abstract classes that support a particular style of fork/join processing, typically RecursiveAction for most computations that do not return results, RecursiveTask for those that do, and CountedCompleter for those in which completed actions trigger other actions. Normally, a concrete ForkJoinTask subclass declares fields comprising its parameters, established in a constructor, and then defines a compute method that somehow uses the control methods supplied by this base class.

Method join() and its variants are appropriate for use only when completion dependencies are acyclic; that is, the parallel computation can be described as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Otherwise, executions may encounter a form of deadlock as tasks cyclically wait for each other. However, this framework supports other methods and techniques (for example the use of Phaser, helpQuiesce(), and complete(V)) that may be of use in constructing custom subclasses for problems that are not statically structured as DAGs. To support such usages, a ForkJoinTask may be atomically tagged with a short value using setForkJoinTaskTag(short) or compareAndSetForkJoinTaskTag(short, short) and checked using getForkJoinTaskTag(). The ForkJoinTask implementation does not use these protected methods or tags for any purpose, but they may be of use in the construction of specialized subclasses. For example, parallel graph traversals can use the supplied methods to avoid revisiting nodes/tasks that have already been processed. (Method names for tagging are bulky in part to encourage definition of methods that reflect their usage patterns.)

Most base support methods are final, to prevent overriding of implementations that are intrinsically tied to the underlying lightweight task scheduling framework. Developers creating new basic styles of fork/join processing should minimally implement protected methods exec(), setRawResult(V), and getRawResult(), while also introducing an abstract computational method that can be implemented in its subclasses, possibly relying on other protected methods provided by this class.

ForkJoinTasks should perform relatively small amounts of computation. Large tasks should be split into smaller subtasks, usually via recursive decomposition. As a very rough rule of thumb, a task should perform more than 100 and less than 10000 basic computational steps, and should avoid indefinite looping. If tasks are too big, then parallelism cannot improve throughput. If too small, then memory and internal task maintenance overhead may overwhelm processing.

This class provides adapt methods for Runnable and Callable, that may be of use when mixing execution of ForkJoinTasks with other kinds of tasks. When all tasks are of this form, consider using a pool constructed in asyncMode.

ForkJoinTasks are Serializable, which enables them to be used in extensions such as remote execution frameworks. It is sensible to serialize tasks only before or after, but not during, execution. Serialization is not relied on during execution itself.