Posted in: Thread Pool
Thread Pools are useful when you need to limit the number of threads running in your application at the same time. There is a performance overhead associated with starting a new thread, and each thread is also allocated some memory for its stack etc.Instead of starting a new thread for every task to execute concurrently, the task can be passed to a thread pool. As soon as the pool has any idle threads the task is assigned to one of them and executed. Internally the tasks are inserted into a Blocking Queue which the threads in the pool are dequeuing from. When a new task is inserted into the queue one of the idle threads will dequeue it successfully and execute it. The rest of the idle threads in the pool will be blocked waiting to dequeue tasks.
Thread pools are often used in multi threaded servers. Each connection arriving at the server via the network is wrapped as a task and passed on to a thread pool. The threads in the thread pool will process the requests on the connections concurrently. A later trail will get into detail about implementing multithreaded servers in Java.
Java 5 comes with built in thread pools in the java.util.concurrent package, so you don’t have to implement your own thread pool. Still it can be useful to know a bit about the implementation of a thread pool anyways.
The thread pool implementation consists of two parts. A ThreadPool class which is the public interface to the thread pool, and a PoolThread class which implements the threads that execute the tasks.
ThreadPool Example