"I was fortunate indeed to have worked with a fantastic team on the design and implementation of the concurrency features added to the Java platform in Java 5.0 and Java 6. Now this same team provides the best explanation yet of these new features, and of concurrency in general. Concurrency is no longer a subject for advanced users only. Every Java developer should read this book." --Martin Buchholz JDK Concurrency Czar, Sun Microsystems "For the past 30 years, computer performance has been driven by Moore's Law; from now on, it will be driven by Amdahl's Law. Writing code that effectively exploits multiple processors can be very challenging. Java Concurrency in Practice provides you with the concepts and techniques needed to write safe and scalable Java programs for today's--and tomorrow's--systems." --Doron Rajwan Research Scientist, Intel Corp "This is the book you need if you're writing--or designing, or debugging, or maintaining, or contemplating--multithreaded Java programs. If you've ever had to synchronize a method and you weren't sure why, you owe it to yourself and your users to read this book, cover to cover." --Ted Neward Author of Effective Enterprise Java "Brian addresses the fundamental issues and complexities of concurrency with uncommon clarity. This book is a must-read for anyone who uses threads and cares about performance." --Kirk Pepperdine CTO, JavaPerformanceTuning.com "This book covers a very deep and subtle topic in a very clear and concise way, making it the perfect Java Concurrency reference manual. Each page is filled with the problems (and solutions!) that programmers struggle with every day. Effectively exploiting concurrency is becoming more and more important now that Moore's Law is delivering more cores but not faster cores, and this book will show you how to do it." --Dr. Cliff Click Senior Software Engineer, Azul Systems "I have a strong interest in concurrency, and have probably written more thread deadlocks and made more synchronization mistakes than most programmers. Brian's book is the most readable on the topic of threading and concurrency in Java, and deals with this difficult subject with a wonderful hands-on approach. This is a book I am recommending to all my readers of The Java Specialists' Newsletter, because it is interesting, useful, and relevant to the problems facing Java developers today." --Dr. Heinz Kabutz The Java Specialists' Newsletter "I've focused a career on simplifying simple problems, but this book ambitiously and effectively works to simplify a complex but critical subject: concurrency. Java Concurrency in Practice is revolutionary in its approach, smooth and easy in style, and timely in its delivery--it's destined to be a very important book." --Bruce Tate Author of Beyond Java "Java Concurrency in Practice is an invaluable compilation of threading know-how for Java developers. I found reading this book intellectually exciting, in part because it is an excellent introduction to Java's concurrency API, but mostly because it captures in a thorough and accessible way expert knowledge on threading not easily found elsewhere." --Bill Venners Author of Inside the Java Virtual Machine Threads are a fundamental part of the Java platform. As multicore processors become the norm, using concurrency effectively becomes essential for building high-performance applications. Java SE 5 and 6 are a huge step forward for the development of concurrent applications, with improvements to the Java Virtual Machine to support high-performance, highly scalable concurrent classes and a rich set of new concurrency building blocks. In Java Concurrency in Practice, the creators of these new facilities explain not only how they work and how to use them, but also the motivation and design patterns behind them. However, developing, testing, and debugging multithreaded programs can still be very difficult; it is all too easy to create concurrent programs that appear to work, but fail when it matters most: in production, under heavy load. Java Concurrency in Practice arms readers with both the theoretical underpinnings and concrete techniques for building reliable, scalable, maintainable concurrent applications. Rather than simply offering an inventory of concurrency APIs and mechanisms, it provides design rules, patterns, and mental models that make it easier to build concurrent programs that are both correct and performant. This book covers: Basic concepts of concurrency and thread safety Techniques for building and composing thread-safe classes Using the concurrency building blocks in java.util.concurrent Performance optimization dos and don'ts Testing concurrent programs Advanced topics such as atomic variables, nonblocking algorithms, and the Java Memory Model

Table of Contents:
Listings     xii Preface     xvii Chapter 1: Introduction     1 1.1  A (very) brief history of concurrency       1 1.2  Benefits of threads      3 1.3  Risks of threads       5 1.4  Threads are everywhere       9 Part I: Fundamentals     13 Chapter 2: Thread Safety     15 2.1  What is thread safety?      17 2.2  Atomicity     19 2.3  Locking     23 2.4  Guarding state with locks      27 2.5  Liveness and performance       29 Chapter 3: Sharing Objects     33 3.1  Visibility      33 3.2  Publication and escape       39 3.3  Thread confinement       42 3.4  Immutability       46 3.5  Safepublication       49 Chapter 4: Composing Objects     55 4.1  Designing a thread-safe class      55 4.2  Instance confinement      58 4.3  Delegating thread safety      62 4.4  Adding functionality to existing thread-safe classes       71 4.5  Documenting synchronization policies       74 Chapter 5: Building Blocks     79 5.1  Synchronized collections       79 5.2  Concurrent collections     84 5.3  Blocking queues and the producer-consumer pattern     87 5.4  Blocking and interruptible methods     92 5.5  Synchronizers     94 5.6  Building an efficient, scalable result cache      101 Part II: Structuring Concurrent Applications     111 Chapter 6: Task Execution     113 6.1  Executing tasks in threads      113 6.2  The Executor framework     117 6.3  Finding exploitable parallelism      123 Chapter 7: Cancellation and Shutdown     135 7.1  Task cancellation      135 7.2  Stopping a thread-based service       150 7.3  Handling abnormal thread termination       161 7.4  JVM shutdown      164 Chapter 8: Applying Thread Pools     167 8.1  Implicit couplings between tasks and execution policies     167 8.2  Sizing thread pools      170 8.3  Configuring ThreadPoolExecutor     171 8.4  Extending ThreadPoolExecutor     179 8.5  Parallelizing recursive algorithms     181 Chapter 9: GUI Applications     189 9.1  Why are GUIs single-threaded?      189 9.2  Short-running GUI tasks     192 9.3  Long-running GUI tasks     195 9.4  Shared data models     198 9.5  Other forms of single-threaded subsystems      202 Part III: Liveness, Performance, and Testing     203 Chapter 10: Avoiding Liveness Hazards     205 10.1  Deadlock     205 10.2  Avoiding and diagnosing deadlocks     215 10.3  Other liveness hazards      218 Chapter 11: Performance and Scalability     221 11.1  Thinking about performance      221 11.2  Amdahl's law     225 11.3  Costs introduced by threads     229 11.4  Reducing lock contention      232 11.5  Example: Comparing Map performance     242 11.6  Reducing context switch overhead      243 Chapter 12: Testing Concurrent Programs     247 12.1  Testing for correctness     248 12.2  Testing for performance      260 12.3  Avoiding performance testing pitfalls       266 12.4  Complementary testing approaches     270 Part IV: Advanced Topics     275 Chapter 13: Explicit Locks     277 13.1  Lock and ReentrantLock      277 13.2  Performance considerations      282 13.3  Fairness      283 13.4  Choosing between synchronized and ReentrantLock      285 13.5  Read-write locks     286 Chapter 14: Building Custom Synchronizers     291 14.1  Managing state dependence      291 14.2  Using condition queues      298 14.3  Explicit condition objects     306 14.4  Anatomy of a synchronizer     308 14.5  AbstractQueuedSynchronizer      311 14.6  AQS in java.util.concurrent synchronizer classes      314 Chapter15: Atomic Variables and Nonblocking Synchronization     319 15.1  Disadvantages of locking     319 15.2  Hardware support for concurrency      321 15.3  Atomic variable classes       324 15.4  Nonblocking algorithms      329 Chapter 16: The Java Memory Model     337 16.1  What is a memory model, and why would I want one?       337 16.2  Publication     344 16.3  Initialization safety     349 Appendix A: Annotations for Concurrency     353 A.1  Class annotations     353 A.2  Field andmethod annotations      353 Bibliography     355 Index     359