Interthread Communication

 

Consider the classic queuing problem, where one thread is producing some data and another is consuming it. To make the problem more interesting, suppose that the producer has to wait until the consumer is finished before it generates more data.

In a polling system, the consumer would waste many CPU cycles while it waited for the producer to produce. Once the producer was finished, it would start polling, wasting more CPU cycles waiting for the consumer to finish, and so on. Clearly, this situation is undesirable.

To avoid polling, Java includes an elegant interprocess communication mechanism via the following methods:

wait( ): This method tells the calling thread to give up the monitor and go to sleep until some other thread enters the same monitor and calls notify( ).

notify( ): This method wakes up the first thread that called wait( ) on the same object.

notifyAll( ): This method wakes up all the threads that called wait( ) on the same object. The highest priority thread will run first.

These methods are implemented as final methods in Object, so all classes have them. All three methods can be called only from within a synchronized context.

These methods are declared within Object. Various forms of wait( ) exist that allow you to specify a period of time to wait.

Example:

The following sample program consists of four classes: Q, the queue that you're trying to synchronize; Producer, the threaded object that is producing queue entries; Consumer, the threaded object that is consuming queue entries; and PC, the tiny class that creates the single Q, Producer, and Consumer.

The proper way to write this program in Java is to use wait( ) and notify( ) to signal in both directions, as shown here:

class Q {    int n;    boolean valueSet = false;    synchronized int get() {       if(!valueSet)       try {          wait();       } catch(InterruptedException e) {          System.out.println("InterruptedException caught");       }       System.out.println("Got: " + n);       valueSet = false;       notify();       return n;    }    synchronized void put(int n) {       if(valueSet)       try {          wait();       } catch(InterruptedException e) {          System.out.println("InterruptedException caught");       }       this.n = n;       valueSet = true;       System.out.println("Put: " + n);       notify();    } } class Producer implements Runnable {    Q q;    Producer(Q q) {       this.q = q;       new Thread(this, "Producer").start();    }    public void run() {       int i = 0;       while(true) {          q.put(i++);       }    } } class Consumer implements Runnable {     Q q;     Consumer(Q q) {        this.q = q;        new Thread(this, "Consumer").start();     }     public void run() {        while(true) {        q.get();     }   } } class PCFixed {    public static void main(String args[]) {       Q q = new Q();       new Producer(q);       new Consumer(q);       System.out.println("Press Control-C to stop.");    } }

Inside get( ), wait( ) is called. This causes its execution to suspend until the Producer notifies you that some data is ready.

When this happens, execution inside get( ) resumes. After the data has been obtained, get( ) calls notify( ). This tells Producer that it is okay to put more data in the queue.

Inside put( ), wait( ) suspends execution until the Consumer has removed the item from the queue. When execution resumes, the next item of data is put in the queue, and notify( ) is called. This tells the Consumer that it should now remove it.

Here is some output from this program, which shows the clean synchronous behavior:

Put: 1 Got: 1 Put: 2 Got: 2 Put: 3 Got: 3 Put: 4 Got: 4 Put: 5 Got: 5