Overview
Overview
In our daily day-to-day programming life, we need to use collections. But I believe, the choice of collection should be made carefully and that’s why in Java, we have huge array of different collections.
In addition, Java 5 has introduced lots of new thread-safe collections such as ConcurrentLinkedQueue, ConcurrentSkipListMap, CopyOnWriteArrayList etc.
Benefits
The benefits of using these concurrent collections include internal synchronization. Programmers don’t require to impose client side locking. This kind of external synchronization is not required at all while using these concurrent collections. For improved thread-safety, the concurrent collections yield better performance. And hence, it is advisable to use such collections whenever we need.
Mechanisms
The concurrent collections incorporate several mechanisms under the hood to obtain thread safety. The mechanims are discussed below.
Copy-on-Write
The collections that make use of Copy-On-Write, uses Arrays as their backing data containers. The backing array is immutable and hence any change or modification to the data contained in such a collection will result in a new backing array by copying the data from the previous one.
Examples: CopyOnWriteArrayList, CopyOnWriteArraySet
Use-case: Reads dominate over writes
Compare-and-Sweep
This mechanism is mainly used in such collections where internal computation on its values is a requirement. Let’s consider we have a value that needs to operated on for a computation. We would have incorporated traditional synchronization on the whole computation logic but using Compare-and-Sweep, it caches a local copy of the concerned variable. The computation is then executed on the actual variable (not the copy). Whenever we need to update the value, the local value is checked whether it still has the same value as it contained at the beginning. If so, then the value is updated and if not, then it is considered to be updated by other thread. If it is updated by another thread, the mechanism retries to compute on the new updated value again.
Examples: ConcurrentLinkedQueue, ConcurrentSkipListMap
Using Lock
Few collections in the Java collections framework make use of the Java 5 Locks mechanisms to provided internal synchronization.
Examples: ConcurrentHashMap, BlockingQueue
Iterators
While traversing through a container, it is necessary for client code to use iterators on the collection. Due to incorporation of the aforementioned mechanisms, the policies of iterators have been changed a bit.
Fail-Fast Iterator
This is the basic type of iterator which fails to modify items of any collection while traversing. This type of iterator throws ConcurrentModificationException on such scenarios.
Snapshot Iterator
This iterator unlike Fail-Fast iterator doesn’t report ConcurrentModificationException. The previously discussed Copy-on-Write collections yield such Snapshot iterators. If you recall the Copy-on-Write mechanism, it creates new backing array on modification of any item in the collection. That’s why this kind of iterator only reads the values from one of these backing arrays without any danger of these items being modified by another thread.
Weakly Consistent Iterator
The aforementioned Compare-and-Sweep collections use this kind of iterator. According to this iterator’s policy, it can accommodate changes partially and hence it doesn’t guarantee all the changes to be reflected. Like Snapshot iterator, it also doesn’t throw ConcurrentModificationException.
Few collections like DelayQueue, PriorityBlockingQueue incorporate the Weakly Consistent iterator but these changes have been included in Java 6 but before Java 6, these collections use Fail-Fast iterators. Hence, to use these collections in thread-safe manner before Java 6, you have to utilize the old-school external synchronization methods.