When Synchrozation Fails in Java

My blog title goes like “Ramblings about workplace, java, python, linux and web " . But my recent posts were distracted from this tagline. The frank answer to this is I was procrastinating. It is not i have not been learning much. I have learnt a lot of new things professionally but could not get them together to share my learning on the blog.

I was surfing the web to dig deep into Java, When i came across this great post by Curious Schemer.

Mr Ray deliberately explains things in the post that we are rhetorically asked to use ArrayList over Vector for better performance . If we need to make it thread safe. We do it this way : List list = Collections.synchronizedList(new ArrayList()); But it does not solves the purpose. The thread safety breaks if we do something like this : final List list = Collections.synchronizedList(new ArrayList()); final int nThreads = 1; ExecutorService es = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(nThreads); for (int i = 0; i < nThreads; i++) {   es.execute(new Runnable() {   public void run() {   while(true) {   try {   list.clear();   list.add("888");   list.remove(0);   } catch(IndexOutOfBoundsException ioobe) {   ioobe.printStackTrace();   }   }   }   }); }

As long nThreads is 1, everything runs just fine. However, increase the number of nThreads to 2, and you start getting this:

java.lang.IndexOutOfBoundsException: Index: 0, Size: 0

at java.util.ArrayList.RangeCheck(Unknown Source)

at java.util.ArrayList.remove(Unknown Source)

at java.util.Collections$SynchronizedList.remove(Unknown Source)

Now the workaround to get away with this problem , is to use block level synchronization . Synchronize the methods which update the list to the fine grain level is the best approach to avoid such exceptions .

synchronized (list) {   list.clear();   list.add("888");   list.remove(0); }

I learnt my lesson here , one should use atomic level synchrozation to keep the performance and effeciency intact.

The Full Post by Mr.Ray is worth read it explains further conflicts in using synchronization .

Crossposted from https://jasdeepsingh.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/when-synchrozation-fails-in-java/