Java Code Geeks

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Java's Synchronization support may lead to read/write performance bottlenecks

In order to support multi-threading applications, Java provides "synchronized" keyword. The problem with Java's basic support of synchronization is that - synchronized keyword locks on the object level. For example, if we mark one method of a class as synchronized, then if one thread is inside this method, no other thread can not run any synchronized code of the same object.
lets take an example of a Cache implementation. Lets say we created one hashtable which is the cahche in our application. It caches some objects which are otherwise to be fetched from the database. In order to save the round-trip, some of the objects are read from the database and are cached inside the hashtable. Now as it is a cache, so there will be more reads than writes. If we use synchronized keyword and use the cache object as synchronized object, all reads and writes to this cache will be serialized. Whereas in reality, multiple reads can happen concurrently and can enhance performance.

For a minute, lets think about a database table, most of the time we read from the table and at times we write into the table. If reads are serialized, the whole application will become slower. So database have concept like "shared lock" and "exclusive lock".

Sometimes it become very obvious in case of Java applications also to adopt to this type of "shared lock" and "exclusive lock". Reads from the cache should hold a shared lock and write to it should hold an exclusive lock.

Since Java's native API does not support this one needs to write his own logic to make sure he is following this shared/exclusvie concepts.

Here comes this book which is very handy - "Concurrent Programming in Java: Design Principals and Practices". The author Doug Lea maintains a site http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/ where he has a package called util.concurrent which can perform lot of such locking. These packages are also getting included in JSR166.

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