A CountDownLatch's latch.await() method vs Thread.join() - java

I saw a stackoverflow member suggest using Thread.join() to have a "main" thread wait for 2 "task" threads to complete.
I will frequently do something different (shown below) and I want to know if there are any problems with my approach.
final CountDownLatch latch = new CountDownLatch(myItems.length);
for (Item item : myItems) {
//doStuff launches a Thread that calls latch.countDown() as it's final act
item.doStuff(latch);
}
latch.await(); //ignoring Exceptions for readability

Your solution is easier to scale. Thread.join() was a perfectly fine way of resolving your issue before CountdownLatch and the other synchronizers were created.
In terms of readability, I would choose the CountdownLatch approach over joining on each thread. This also allows you to change the implementation of Item to maybe submit to an Executor service instead of using Threads directly.

I would prefer using a Future (easy if you're using an ExecutorService). Then after submitting all the tasks wait for them all to finish.
Collection<Future<Void>> futures = new ArrayList<Future<Void>>(myItems.length());
for ( Runnable item : myItems ) {
futures.add(executor.submit(item, null));
for ( Future<Void> future : futures )
future.get(); //easy to add a timeout here
The final for-loop could easily be separated into a utily method. This encapsulates the synchronization and makes it easy to add timeouts.
It's also more applicable to the general case, where the worker threads actually need to return a result. (If you don't care about what the worker threads end up doing, why do you need to wait for them?)

The countdown latch is preferred for simultaneously starting all the threads at the same time.

Related

How can I ensure an ExecutorService pool has completed, without shutting it down?

Currently, I'm making sure my tasks have finished before moving on like so:
ExecutorService pool = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(5);
public Set<Future> EnqueueWork(StreamWrapper stream) {
Set<Future> futureObjs = new HashSet<>();
util.setData(stream);
Callable callable = util;
Future future = pool.submit(callable);
futureObjs.add(future);
pool.shutdown();
try {
pool.awaitTermination(Long.MAX_VALUE, TimeUnit.NANOSECONDS);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
Node.sendTCP(Node.getNodeByHostname(StorageTopology.getNextPeer()), Coordinator.prepareForTransport(stream));
return futureObjs;
}
However, because of some other threading on my socket, it's possible that multiple calls are made to EnqueueWork - I'd like to make sure the calls to .submit have completed in the current thread, without shutting down the pool for subsequent threads coming in.
Is this possible?
You can check by invoking isDone() method on all the Future objects in futureObjs. You need to make sure isDone is called in a loop. calling get() method on Future object is another option, since get() is a blocking call, it will return only after task is completed and result is ready. But do you really want to keep the pool open after all the tasks are done?
I agree with one of the comments, it seems odd that your executor can be used by different threads. Usually and executor is private to an instance of some class, but anyhow.
What you can do, from the docs, is to check:
getActiveCount() - Returns the approximate number of threads that are >actively executing tasks.
NOTE: This is a blocking method, it will take out a lock on the workers of your threadpool and block until it has counted everything
And also check:
getQueue() - Returns the task queue used by this executor. Access to the
task queue is intended primarily for debugging and monitoring.
This queue may be in active use. Retrieving the task queue
does not prevent queued tasks from executing.
If your queue is empty and the activeCount is 0, all your tasks should have finished. I say should because getActiveCount says "approximate". Looking at the impl, this is most likely because the worker internally has a flag indicating that it is locked (in use). There is in theory a slight race between executing and the worker being done and marking itself so.
A better approach would in fact be to track the features. You would have to check the Queue and that all futures are done.
However I think what you really need is to reverse your logic. Instead of the current thread trying to work out if another thread has submitted work in the meantime, you should have the other thread call isShutdown() and simply not submit a new task in that case.
You are approaching this issue from the wrong direction. If you need to know whether or not your tasks are finished, that means you have a dependency of A->B. The executor is the wrong place to ensure that dependency, as much as you don't ask the engine of your car "are we there yet?".
Java offers several features to ensure that a certain state has been reached before starting a new execution path. One of them is the invokeAll method of the ExecutorService, that returns only when all tasks that have been submitted are completed.
pool.invokeAll(listOfAllMyCallables);
// if you reach this point all callables are completed
You have already added Future to the set. Just add below code block to get the status of each Future task by calling get() with time out period.
In my example, time out is 60 seconds. You can change it as per your requirement.
Sample code:
try{
for(Future future : futureObjs){
System.out.println("future.status = " + future.get(60000, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS));
}
}catch(Exception err){
err.printStackTrace();
}
Other useful posts:
How to forcefully shutdown java ExecutorService
How to wait for completion of multiple tasks in Java?

java multithreading for synchronization between tasks

I have a requirement in multi-threaded environment in java. The problem is like;
I have suppose 10 different task, and I want to assign all these 10 task to 10 different threads. Now the finish time for these tasks could be different. And there is some finishing or clearance task which should be performed when all these 10 threads are finished. In other words i need to wait until all threads are finished and then only I can go ahead with my further code execution.
Please let me know if any more details required here.
Thansk,
Ashish
Sounds like an ideal job for CountDownLatch.
Initialize it with 10 counts and when each thread finishes its job, it counts down one.
When all 10 threads have finished, the CountDownLatch will let the original thread run, and it can perform the cleanup.
And fire up an ExecutorService with 10 fixed threads to run the tasks.
CyclicBarier (JDK java.util.concurrent) of size 10 is perfect solutuon for you. With CyclicBarier you can wait for 10 threads. If all t hreads achieve barier then you can go further.
Edit: CyclicBarier is almost the same as CountDownLatch but you can reuse barier invoking reset() method.
Whilst CountDownLatch and CyclicBarier do the job of synchronizing multiple threads and performing one action when all threads reach the required point, they require all tasks to actively use this feature. If you are interested in the finishing of the entire task(s) only, the solution can be much simpler: add all tasks to a Collection and use the invokeAll method of an ExecutorService which returns when all tasks have been completed. A simple example:
Callable<Void> simpleTask=new Callable<Void>() {
public Void call() {
System.out.println("Performing one job");
return null;
}
};
List<Callable<Void>> list = Collections.nCopies(10, simpleTask);
ExecutorService es=Executors.newFixedThreadPool(10);
es.invokeAll(list);
System.out.println("All completed");
If each thread terminates after it is finished, you could just use the join() statement. A simple example can be found in the Essential Java Tutorials.
ArrayList<Thread> myThreads = new ArrayList<Thread>();
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++){
//MyTaskRunnable is a Runnable with your logic
Thread t = new Thread(new MyTaskRunnable());
myThreads.add(t);
}
for(Thread t : myThreads){
t.start();
}
//here all threads are running
for(Thread t : myThreads){
t.join();
}
//here all threads have terminated
Edit:
The other answers all have their merits and are very useful in practice, the join() is however the most basic of the constructs. The CyclicBarrier and CountDownLatch versions allow your threads to continue running after reaching the synchronization point, which can be necessary in some cases. The ExecutorService is more suited to many tasks needing to be executed on a fixed number of threads (aka a thread pool), to create an ExecutorService for just 10 tasks is a bit drastic.
Finally, if you are new to learning Java or are taking a course on concurrency, you should try out all the variants and see what they do. The join is the most basic of these constructs and will help you understand you what is going on. Also it is the basic model supported by most other languages.

Is there an ExecutorService on blocking thread?

Is there an ExecutorService that allows an existing thread to perform the executions instead of spawning new threads? Bonus if it’s a ScheduledExecutor. Most executors spawn worker threads to do the execution, but I want the worker thread to be an existing thread that I’m on. Here's the API that I imagine:
while (!executor.isTerminated()) {
Runnable r = executor.take();
r.run();
}
This is similar to the way that SWT and JavaFX allow the main thread to dispatch events, as opposed to Swing, which requires its own event dispatch thread to be spawned to handle events.
Motivation: I currently have lots of places where a thread spawn a new executor and then just calls awaitTermination() to wait for it to finish. I’d like to save some resources and keep the stack traces from being split in two.
Note that I don’t want an executor that runs tasks in execute(Runnable)’s caller threads, which is what this answer and Guava’s MoreExecutors.sameThreadExecutor() do.
Most executors from java.util.concurrent behave exactly as you supposed. Some spawn additional threads when there are too many tasks, but usually they can be configured to set a limit.
To exploit such a behaviour, do not start new executor each time - use the same executor. To wait for a set of tasks to finish, use invokeAll(), or submit() and then future.get()
I'm assuming what you want is control over the creation of new threads, such as name, daemon-status, etc. Use a ThreadFactory:
public class MyThreadFactory implements ThreadFactory {
public Thread newThread(Runnable runnable) {
Thread t = new Thread(runnable, "MyThreadName");
t.setDaemon(true);
return t;
}
}
This allows you to control thread creation so that the execution happens in threads that you manufacture instead of some default thread from a default ThreadFactory.
Then to use it, all of the methods in Executors take a ThreadFactory:
Executors.newExecutorOfSomeKind(new MyThreadFactory());
Edit: I see what you mean now. Unfortunately, the behavior of all Executor implementations (as far as I'm aware) is to create new threads to run the task, except the sameThreadExecutor you mentioned. Without going through the Thread objects that are creating executors just to execute one task (which is a horrible design -- see comments for what I mean by this), there's no easy way to accomplish what you want. I would recommend changing the code to use a single Executor with something like an ExecutorCompletionService (see this question) or use a fork/join pattern. Fork/join is made easier in Java 7 (see this Java trail). For pre-Java 7 code, read up on the counting Semaphore in Java (and in general).

Executor in java

I was trying to run ExecutorService object with FixedThreadPool and I ran into problems.
I expected the program to run in nanoseconds but it was hung. I found that I need to use Semaphore along with it so that the items in the queue do not get added up.
Is there any way I can come to know that all the threads of the pool are used.
Basic code ...
static ExecutorService pool = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(4);
static Semaphore permits = new Semaphore(4);
try {
permits.acquire();
pool.execute(p); // Assuming p is runnable on large number of objects
permits.release();
} catch ( InterruptedException ex ) {
}
This code gets hanged and I really don't know why. How to know if pool is currently waiting for all the threads to finish?
By default, if you submit more than 4 tasks to your pool then the extra tasks will be queued until a thread becomes available.
The blog you referenced in your comment uses the semaphore to limit the amount of work that can be queued at once, which won't be a problem for you until you have many thousands of tasks queued up and they start eating into the available memory. There's an easier way to do this, anyway - construct a ThreadPoolExecutor with a bounded queue.* But this isn't your problem.
If you want to know when a task completes, notice that ExecutorService.submit() returns a Future object which can be used to wait for the task's completion:
Future<?> f = pool.execute(p);
f.get();
System.out.println("task complete");
If you have several tasks and want to wait for all of them to complete, either store each Future in a list and then call get() on each in turn, or investigate ExecutorService.invokeAll() (which essentially does the same but in a single method call).
You can also tell whether a task has completed or not:
Future<?> f = pool.execute(p);
while(!f.isDone()) {
// do something else, task not complete
}
f.get();
Finally, note that even if your tasks are complete, your program may not exit (and thus appears to "hang") if you haven't called shutdown() on the thread pool; the reason is that the threads are still running, waiting to be given more work to do.
*Edit: sorry, I just re-read my answer and realised this part is incorrect - ThreadPoolExecutor offers tasks to the queue and rejects them if they aren't accepted, so a bounded queue has different semantics to the semaphore approach.
You do not need the Semaphore.
If you are hanging it is probably because the threads are locking themselves elsewhere.
Run the code in a Debuger and when it hangs pause it and see what the threads are doing.
You could change to using a ThreadPoolExecutor. It contains a getActiveCount() method which returns an approximate count of the active threads. Why it is approximate I'm not sure.

Collecting Return Values from Launched Threads? [latest Java]

I'm looking for the simplest, most straightforward way to implement the following:
main starts and launches 3 threads
all 3 tasks process and end in a resulting value (which I need to return somehow?)
main waits (.join?) on each thread to ensure they have all 3 completed their task
main somehow gets the value from each thread (3 values)
Then the rest is fairly simple, processes the 3 results and then terminates...
Now, I've been doing some reading and found multiple ideas, like:
Using Future, but this is for asynch, is this really a good idea when the main thread needs to block waiting for all 3 spawned threads to finsih?
Passing in an object (to a thread) and then simply having the thread "fill it" with the result
Somehow using Runnable (not sure how yet).
Anyways - what would be the best, and simplest recommended approach?
Thanks,
List<Callable<Result>> list = ... create list of callables
ExecutorService es = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(3);
List<Future<Result>> results = es.invokeAll(list);
ExecutorService.invokeAll method will return only after all tasks (instances of Callable) finished, either normally or by throwing exception.
For details see ExecutorService (mainly its invokeAll method), Executors, Callable.
You could also use a Semaphore from java.util.concurrent.
Create a new Semaphore with 1 - #threads permits and have main call acquire() on the Semaphore.
When each of the threads you have created has finished it's work, get it to call the release() method.
As you have created a Semaphore with a negative number of permits the call to acquire() will block until this number becomes positive. This will not happen until all of your threads have released a permit on the Semaphore.

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