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How to get started with Multithreading in Java

Aditya Sridhar on April 18, 2019

This post was originally published in adityasridhar.com What is a Thread A Thread is a lightweight Process. Any Process can have multip...
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Phil Ashby •

Thanks Aditya, if you don't mind I'll add a couple of things to think about when considering the use of threads in any language:

  • Threads are hard to get right: radar.oreilly.com/2007/01/threads-... and especially the paper linked here: www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRp...
  • Performance on multi-core systems and application responsiveness can often be achieved with less risky / easier-to-debug / easier-to-test solutions such as asynchronous or event-driven design, multi-processing / pipelining (the Un*x way).
  • If you still need threaded execution in one process, always design your data flows first, implement a single-threaded version, then look at where adding threads would actually help, such as providing parallel computation or interfacing to a synchronous API in the background. Use well-tested threading libraries to help (such as built-in pooling in .NET CLR), isolate and synchronise threads through data flows, typically with queue objects, writing testable worker methods and exposing measurable data flow metrics (queue lengths) to diagnose problems..
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Aditya Sridhar •

Thank you for adding these points