Saturday 7 July 2012

Item 72: Don’t depend on the thread scheduler


When many threads are runnable, the thread scheduler determines which ones get to run, and for how long. Any reasonable operating system will try to make this determination fairly, but the policy can vary. Therefore, well-written programs shouldn’t depend on the details of this policy. Any program that relies on the thread scheduler for correctness or performance is likely to be nonportable.

The best way to write a robust, responsive, portable program is to ensure that the average number of runnable threads is not significantly greater than the number of processors. This leaves the thread scheduler with little choice: it simply runs the runnable threads till they’re no longer runnable. The program’s behavior doesn’t vary too much, even under radically different thread-scheduling policies. Note that the number of runnable threads isn’t the same as the total number of threads, which can be much higher. Threads that are waiting are not runnable.

The main technique for keeping the number of runnable threads down is to have each thread do some useful work and then wait for more. Threads should not run if they aren’t doing useful work.

Threads should not busy-wait, repeatedly checking a shared object waiting for something to happen. Besides making the program vulnerable to the vagaries of the scheduler, busy-waiting greatly increases the load on the processor, reducing the amount of useful work that others can accomplish. As an extreme example of what not to do, consider this perverse reimplementation of CountDownLatch:

// Awful CountDownLatch implementation - busy-waits incessantly!
public class SlowCountDownLatch {
private int count;
public SlowCountDownLatch(int count) {
if (count < 0)
throw new IllegalArgumentException(count + " < 0");
this.count = count;
}
public void await() {
while (true) {
synchronized(this) {
if (count == 0) return;
}
}
}
public synchronized void countDown() {
if (count != 0)
count--;
}
}

On my machine, SlowCountDownLatch is about 2,000 times slower than CountDownLatch when 1,000 threads wait on a latch. While this example may seem a bit far-fetched, it’s not uncommon to see systems with one or more threads that are unnecessarily runnable. The results may not be as dramatic as Slow- CountDownLatch, but performance and portability are likely to suffer.

When faced with a program that barely works because some threads aren’t getting enough CPU time relative to others, resist the temptation to “fix” the program by putting in calls to Thread.yield. You may succeed in getting the program to work after a fashion, but it will not be portable. The same yield invocations that improve performance on one JVM implementation might make it worse on a second and have no effect on a third. Thread.yield has no testable semantics.

A related technique, to which similar caveats apply, is adjusting thread priorities. Thread priorities are among the least portable features of the Java platform. It is not unreasonable to tune the responsiveness of an application by tweaking a few thread priorities, but it is rarely necessary and is not portable.

In summary, do not depend on the thread scheduler for the correctness of your program. The resulting program will be neither robust nor portable. As a corollary, do not rely on Thread.yield or thread priorities. These facilities are merely hints to the scheduler. Thread priorities may be used sparingly to improve the quality of service of an already working program, but they should never be used to “fix” a program that barely works.


Reference: Effective Java 2nd Edition by Joshua Bloch