Thread with custom states - java

Is it possible in Java (Android) to implement a customized version of a Thread which carries its own States?
What I mean is:
While ThreadA is in Running state, it still can be polled by ThreadB that asks for its state
e.g.
ThreadA.getState();
It is possible to modify the states values to some custom ones? So as to implement a sort of basic communication system between those two threads?
Thanks.

Yes that is possible. I used this a lot in my previous projects, all what you need is to extend the Thread class.
public class StateThread extends Thread{
String state = "ThreadState";
public synchronized void setState(String newState){
state = newState;
}
public synchronized String getState(){
return state;
}
#override
public void run(){
// Do stuff and update state...
}
}

Yes, it is possible to perform this task.
Is it a good design? I don't think so.
There are other means to perform communication between threads -
For example, you should use a queue with a Producer/Consumer pattern.
I am sure that Android, as JavaSE supports thread local - you can use it in order to manage local thread data (including states) (maybe in combination with a queue that will get "operations" to change the state managed by a thread
If you do decide to go for the solution of having setState and getState methods, at least consider using the ReaderWriterLock to optimize your locking

Threads state is maintained by the Virtual Machine. VM uses the state to monitor and manage the actual thread.
That's why there is no mechanism to modify the state of the Thread. There is no setState function that allows to set your custom state.
For your application purpose, you can define your own instance variables by extending Thread but that cannot alter Thread's state in any way.

Synchronizing with shared data is not very useful for determining the 'state' of a thread - the thread writes its state as 'healthy', then gets stuck - the monitor thread then checks the state and finds it healthy.
Monitoring the 'state' should mean making the checked thread do something, not just looking directly at some shared object.
If you have a message-passing design, (as suggested by zaske), you can pass around a 'state record' on the input queue of evey thread, asking it to record its state inside and pass it on to the next thread. The 'monitor' thread waits for the record to come back, all filled in. If it does not get it in a resonable time, it could log what it has got - it keeps a reference to the state record object, so it could see which thread has not updated its state. It could, perhaps, fail to feed a watchdog timer.

Related

Detect java thread starting to wait and run some code

Is there any way to put any sort of event listener that will be called when some thread - for example, the current thread - stops its activity and starts waiting or terminates?
I need this for the object to be notified and release some resources, when it is not in active use in this thread but still stored in memory somewhere that prevents it from being garbage collected - otherwise I'd place that resource releasing code in finalise() method.
UPD
Use case: an object that keeps a reference to a jdbc resultset or a database connection; the respective close() or commit() should be called automatically when the object is set aside temporarily or discarded at all without requiring the program to call any sort of cleanup method.
(There is no question how do I lock the object to be accessed from only one thread at a time, it is solved.)
The distinct non-answer: wrong design point. Threads don't "own" resources.
Threads are simply "threads of execution". They run the code you tell them to run. Therefore a thread doesn't own any of the objects it comes by.
As a consequence, there are no built-in mechanisms to help with your requirement. You would have to implement something yourself, relying on monitoring threads, and their states. Which would be a hard and challenging task. Mainly because: multi threading is hard.
The serious recommendation here: step back from this design. Rather think about other, different ways to deal with such "resources".
This is indeed a wrong approach.
You can obviously lock the object and unlock it in a finally block like this:
private Lock lock = new ReentrantLock();
public void useObject() {
lock.lock();
try {
//do something with your resource.
}
finally {
lock.unlock();
}
}
This way if the thread that runs useObject terminates, it will execute the finally block, and unlock the lock that protects the resource.
But there's NO way to detect the thread is not having any activity. If the thread is preempted by the Operation System, there's no way for you to know about it. That's below the abstraction level, you as a developer, operate.
If you want to gain more understanding on how the OS works with threads, and what you can cannot do you should check out
Java Multithreading, Concurrency & Performance Optimization
course on Udemy.
It also talks about how to properly use the right locks to do this kind of safe synchronization, and get the best performance from your application when you have to share resources such as database connections.
I hope it helps

Is it possible for threads not sharing a common resource to notify based on thread-id/name?

If I know the ID of the thread I wish to notify, and share no other common resource, can I notify it?
Both the threads have been initiated by the same application.
the other thread went into wait by using Thread.currentThread().wait(500);
Yes - but you must stop using wait.
The technique is to maintain a Map<String,BlockingQueue> containing a queue for each thread that is running. The String key is the thread ID.
When you want the thread to pause, use queue.poll(long, TimeUnit) instead of wait. You merely need to put something in the queue to wake up the thread and obviously if you know the ID of the thread you can easily obtain it's Queue from the Map.
As long as it's in the same ThreadGroup, you can iterate through all the threads using Thread.enumerate() and find the given thread by it's id and do the usual synchronize and .notify().
This provides additional ways of iterating over all the Threads.
You would want to notify only threads waiting on the same lock. Don't use current thread object as the lock, it doesn't help. Once a thread has been awakened you need to check against a condition to guard against spurious wake ups. if you are sure that there is only one thread waiting on the lock then calling notify on the lock object should wake up the waiting thread.
You can give the threads some common object on which to communicate, and so you won't have to rely on thread names.
Example:
class Notifier extends Thread {
private final Object common;
Notifier(Object common) { this.common = common; }
public void run() {
// do work
synchronized (common) { common.notify(); }
}
}
class Waiter extends Thread {
private final Object common;
Waiter(Object common) { this.common = common; }
public void run() {
// do work
synchronized (common) { common.wait(TIMEOUT); }
}
}
A better yet approach would be to use a java.util.concurrent.CountDownLatch for the same effect.
Yes it is possible. But it is ugly and potentially fragile and/or inefficient.
As #nos says you can use Thread.enumerate() to enumerate the Thread objects in your ThreadGroup, test each one until you can find the thread with the expected name and/or thread id. That is clearly inefficient if there are lots of threads in the group.
The fragility arises in the following respects:
The thread with a given name or id may no longer exist.
There could be multiple threads with the same name.
Thread id values will eventually be recycled when enough threads have been and gone.
and on the synchronization side,
There could conceivably be other parts of your application (or library code) that synchronize using wait/notify on the Thread objects, and you could get unwanted notifies as a result.
On some Java platforms, (at least historically) it is possible to get spontaneous notifications ... so using wait / notify without testing a shared condition variable might result in bad synchronization.
IMO, you would be better off creating (private) objects that you can wait/notify on, and using proper condition variables. Or it that is unappealing, use one of the existing higher level concurrency class for synchronizing.

Possible concurrency issue in Xlet development

I am involved in development of Xlet using Java 1.4 API.
The docs say Xlet interface methods (those are actually xlet life-cycle methods) are called on its special thread (not the EDT thread). I checked by logging - this is true. This is a bit surprising for me, because it is different from BB/Android frameworks where life-cycle methods are called on the EDT, but it's OK so far.
In the project code I see the app extensively uses Display.getInstance().callSerially(Runnable task) calls (this is an LWUIT way of running a Runnable on the EDT thread).
So basically some pieces of code inside of the Xlet implementation class do create/update/read operations on xlet internal state objects from EDT thread and some other pieces of code do from the life-cycle thread without any synchronization (including that state variables are not declared as volatile). Smth like this:
class MyXlet implements Xlet {
Map state = new HashMap();
public void initXlet(XletContext context) throws XletStateChangeException {
state.put("foo", "bar"); // does not run on the EDT thread
Display.getInstance().callSerially(new Runnable() {
public void run() {
// runs on the EDT thread
Object foo = state.get("foo");
// branch logic depending on the got foo
}
});
}
..
}
My question is: does this create a background for rare concurrency issues? Should the access to the state be synchronized explicitly (or at least state should be declared as volatile)?
My guess is it depends on whether the code is run on a multy-core CPU or not, because I'm aware that on a multy-core CPU if 2 threads are running on its own core, then variables are cached so each thread has its own version of the state unless explicitly synchronized.
I would like to get some trustful response on my concerns.
Yes, in the scenario you describe, the access to the shared state must be made thread safe.
There are 2 problems that you need to be aware of:
The first issue, visability (which you've already mentioned), can still occur on a uniprocessor. The problem is that the JIT compiler is allowed to cache varibles in registers and on a context switch the OS will most likely dump the contents of the registers to a thread context so that it can be resumed later on. However, this is not the same as writing the contents of the registers back to the fields of an object, hence after a context switch we can not assume that the fields of an object is up to date.
For example, take the follow code:
class Example {
private int i;
public void doSomething() {
for (i = 0; i < 1000000; i ++) {
doSomeOperation(i);
}
}
}
Since the loop variable (an instance field) i is not declared as volatile, the JIT is allowed to optimise the loop variable i using a CPU register. If this happens, then the JIT will not be required to write the value of the register back to the instance variable i until after the loop has completed.
So, lets's say a thread is executing the above loop and it then get's pre-empted. The newly scheduled thread won't be able to see the latest value of i because the latest value of i is in a register and that register was saved to a thread local execution context. At a minimum the instance field i will need to be declared volatile to force each update of i to be made visible to other threads.
The second issue is consistent object state. Take the HashMap in your code as an example, internally it is composed of several non final member variables size, table, threshold and modCount. Where table is an array of Entry that forms a linked list. When a element is put into or removed from the map, two or more of these state variables need to be updated atomically for the state to be consistent. For HashMap this has to be done within a synchronized block or similar for it to be atomic.
For the second issue, you would still experience problems when running on a uniprocessor. This is because the OS or JVM could pre-emptively switch threads while the current thread is part way through executing the put or remove method and then switch to another thread that tries to perform some other operation on the same HashMap.
Imagine what would happen if your EDT thread was in the middle of calling the 'get' method when a pre-emptive thread switch occurs and you get a callback that tries to insert another entry into the map. But this time the map exceeds the load factor causing the map to resized and all the entries to be re-hashed and inserted.

How to synchronize shared data between threads by using pause then resume or alternatives

I'm writing a game in which a thread - GameThread - loops forever, updating all my sprites, rendering them, and then sleeping for some time before doing it all again. I also have a custom-made Event handler which deals with key presses etc.
This all works fine in most cases. However I have a problem if an event is thrown while GameThread is rendering. On rare occasions, the handler that deals with the event may make a concurrent change to what needs to be rendered affecting the results of the GameThread rendering.
To avoid this, I want the event handler to pause the GameThread immediately, handle the event, then resume GameThread.
The suspend() / resume() methods suit my needs, but they were deprecated. In my case, however, as there is little chance of a deadlock, is it safe to use them regardless?
If no, what other alternatives do I have that don't have a huge amount of overhead?
I have seen a suggestion of requesting a thread to pause by setting a flag in the Thread to be paused. In my case, however, I don't see that as a viable option since the GameThread loop may take a while during an iteration through the loop. I won't be able to check the flag until I'm done with the loop and by then it is too late.
I need immediate pausing, or else the user will notice a delay in the event handling.
If you want to synchronize access to resources, use a ReentrantLock:
ReentrantLock sync = new ReentrantLock();
You'd have to pass that lock to each runnable where you want to access the shared data.
Then in each place you're accessing the resource in question, you would use that shared lock object, and obtain and release the lock (ie, your critical sections):
sync.lock();
try {
// critical section code here
}
finally {
sync.unlock();
}
This is pretty standard concurrent programming in java. Keep in mind "lock" is a blocking method, so you might want to use "tryLock" instead, which allows you to try and acquire the lock, but returns a boolean as to whether or not you actually got the lock:
if (sync.tryLock()) {
try {
//critical section
}
finally {
sync.unlock();
}
}
There's a version of "tryLock" which will wait a given amount of time, before it will give up trying to acquire the lock and return a false value.
Usually, you would do some thread synchronization:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/concurrency/locksync.html
This would let you do one of the two things you are doing: either render in the game rendering thread or do the changes based on your events.
The problem you are facing seems to be that your rendering code is taking too long for you to actually have a smooth experience (i.e. a lot of events can pile up for processing while you are rendering something). In that case, you should make your rendering out of independent pieces that can finish quickly and synchronize on them.
Without any code I cannot give you a specific advice, however in general it would look something like this:
List<Shape> shapesToRender;
Object lockObject = new Object(); // Note this must be somehow shared between two threads
// Your rendering thread method
public void renderForever() {
while(true) {
for(Shape shape: shapesToRender) {
synchronized(lockObject) {
render(shape);
}
}
}
}
// One of your event handlers
public void handleEvent(Event event) {
synchronized(lockObject) {
// Process event somehow, e.g. change the color of some of the shapes
event.getShape().setColor(Color.RED);
}
}
With the above, either:
You will be rendering one shape (and all your event handlers will be waiting for that to finish), or
Some of your event handlers will be doing something (and your rendering thread will be waiting for that to finish)
You should look at this Java trail in more depth:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/concurrency/index.html
as there are other solutions, e.g. using lock objects:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/concurrency/newlocks.html
or concurrent collections:
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/concurrency/collections.html
that, depending on your problem, might be easier and, most importantly, very well tested solutions that would allow you to do something in a standard way, thus avoiding all the pitfalls that you can get into when rolling out custom threading code.
Hope this helps.
The suspend() / resume() methods suit my needs, but they were deprecated. In my case, however, as there is little chance of a deadlock, is it safe to use them regardless?
Obviously, if there is ZERO chance of a deadlock then it is safe. But there are all sorts of unexpected ways to get a deadlock. For instance, you could happen to pause a thread while it is initializing a class ... and that would deadlock any other thread trying to refer to a static field of that class. (This is a consequence of a specified behaviour of the JVM. There are other places where the locking / synchronization that goes on under the hood is not specified. Fair enough. It doesn't need to be ... unless you are contemplating using these deprecated methods.)
So, the reality is that it is really difficult to determine (prove) if it is actually safe. And if you can't determine this, then it is a potentially risky thing to do. That's WHY the methods are deprecated.
(Strictly speaking, this is not a deadlock. A deadlock is when the threads can never proceed. In this case, the other threads can proceed if you can resume the paused thread.)

Is there a way to stabilize direct communication between threads in java?

We have a system in which each thread (there can be dozens of them) works as an individual agent.
It has its own inner variables and objects, and it monitors other threads' objects as well as its own) in order to make decisions.
Unfortunately the system is deadlocking quite often.
Going through java tutorial (http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/concurrency/index.html) and through other topics here at stackoverflow, I managed to avoid some of these deadlocks by synchronizing the methods and using a monitor, as in:
Producer->monitor->Consumer.
However, not all communication between threads can be modeled like this. As I've mentioned before, at a given time one thread must have access to the objects (variables, lists, etc) of the other threads.
The way it's being done now is that each thread has a list with pointers to every other thread, forming a network. By looping through this list, one thread can read all the information it needs from all the others. Even though there is no writing involved (there shouldn't be any problems with data corruption), it still deadlocks.
My question is: is there an already known way for dealing with this sort of problem? A standard pattern such as the monitor solution?
Please let me know if the question needs more explanation and I'll edit the post.
Thank you in advance!
-Edit----
After getting these answers I studied more about java.concurrency and also the actor model. At the moment the problem seems to be fixed by using a reentrant lock:
http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/concurrency/newlocks.html
Since it can back out from an attempt to acquire the locks, it doesn't seem to have the problem of waiting forever for the them.
I also started implementing an alternate version following the actor model since it seems to be an interesting solution to this case.
My main mistakes were:
-Blindly trusting synchronize
-When in the tutorial they say "the lock is on the object" what they actually mean is the whole object running the thread (in my case), not the object I would like to access.
Thank you all for the help!
Look at higher-level concurrency constructs such as the java.util.concurrent package and the Akka framework/library. Synchronizing and locking manually is a guaranteed way to fail with threads in Java.
I would recommend to apply Actor model here (kind of share nothing parallelism model).
Using this model means that all your thread don't interrupt each other explicitely and you don't need to do any synchronization at all.
Instead of making synchronization you'll use messages. When one Actor (thread) needs to get info about another Actor, it just asynchronously send a correspondent message to that Actor.
Each Actor can also respond to messages of certain types. So, when a new message comes, Actor analyses it and sends a response (or does any other activity). The key point here is that processing of incoming messages is being done synchronously (i.e. it's the only point where you need the simplest way of synchronization - just mark the method which processes messages with synchronized modifier).
When one thread needs to synchronize with many other threads in a manner that a deadlock may occur, greedily acquire all your resources, and in the case that you can't acquire a single resource out of the set, release all resources and try again.
It's an algorithm based on the dining philosophers problem.
One important thing to remember is, that you have to aquire all locks in a consistent order across all your threads, in order to avoid the following situation:
Thread 1 Thread 2
acquire A acquire B
acquire B acquire A
One way to do it would be to have only objects used as locks, which can be ordered.
class Lock {
static final AtomicLong counter = new AtomicLong()
final long id = counter.incrementAndGet();
}
which must be used like
if (lock1.id < lock2.id) {
synchronized (lock1) {
synchronized (lock2) {
...
}
}
} else {
synchronized (lock2) {
synchronized (lock1) {
...
}
}
}
Obviously, this becomes tedious soon, in particular, the more locks are involved. Using explicit ReentrantLocks might help, as it more easily allows all that stuff to be factored out into a generic “grab multiple locks method“.
Another strategy, which might be applicable for your problem, would be "hand-over-hand" locking. Consider
class Node {
final ReentrantLock lock = new ReentrantLock();
Node previous;
Node next;
}
with a traversal operation like
Node start = ...;
Node successor;
start.lock.lock();
try {
successor = start.next;
successor.lock.lock();
} finally {
start.lock.unlock();
}
// Here, we own the lock on start's next sibling. We could continue
// with this scheme, traversing the entire graph, at any time holding
// at most two locks: the node we come from and the node we want to
// go to.
The above scheme still requires, that the locks are acquired in a consistent order across all threads. This means, that you can only every traverse the graph either in "forward" direction (i.e., following the thread of next pointers) or "backward" direction (going via previous). As soon as you start using both at random, things become prone to deadlocks again. This is potentially true also, if you make arbitrary changes to the graph structure, changing the positions of nodes.
How about actor model? Shortly speaking, in actor-based programming all threads work as independent actors (or, as you said, agents). Communication is done via messages. Each actor has its own message queue and processes these messages one by one. This model is implemented in a Scala programming language, and one of its frameworks - Akka - may be used from Java.
What I do is use ExecutorServices for each Thread Pool. When you want another thread to do work, you pass it copies (or immutable data) of all the information it will need. This way you have state which is local to a thread or thread pool and you have information which is passed to another thread. i.e. you never pass mutable state to another thread. This avoid the need to ever lock another threads data.

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