Java Project Loom: Understand the new Java concurrency model

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But because threads are shared, by the time the thread is interrupted, it’s possible that it is executing a different task altogether. So that means that everywhere, where we deal with interruptions, we have to consider the possibility that we’ve received an interrupt, not aimed at us, but to some other task. So everywhere we deal with interrupts, we need to handle spurious interruptions.

While a thread waits, it should vacate the CPU core, and allow another to run. It is early days for this project, and so everything — including its scope — is subject to change. Cases 2 & 3 are so close in performance, they are within the margin of error. Means that Virtual Threads are not going to give me the performance boost I was hoping for in this use case… I have never had a question closed by someone else before, so I was confused by the process… I am experimenting with Virtual Threads in my loom-lab project, and wanted to see if Virtual Threads are faster than Platform Threads when doing a parallel stream, but it actually seems slower.

Enough of Loops Wasting My Time: Gimme Some Threads

Notice that with a traditional thread pool, all you had to do was essentially just make sure that your thread pool is not too big, like 100 threads, 200 threads, 500, whatever. You cannot download more than 100 images at once, if you have just 100 threads in your standard thread pool. Continuations that you see in here are actually quite common in different languages.

java project loom

Later, when the response arrives, the JVM will allocate another thread from the pool that will handle the response and so on. This way, multiple threads are involved in handling a single async request. This article discusses the problems in Java’s current concurrency model and how the Java project Loom aims to change them. We also explored the tasks and schedulers in threads and how Fibers Class and pluggable user-mode schedulers can be an excellent alternative for traditional threads in Java.

However, these threads, all of them were actually mapped to a single kernel thread, meaning that the JVM was only utilizing a single thread in your operating system. It was doing all the scheduling, so making sure your user threads are effectively using the CPU. The JVM from the outside was only using a single kernel thread, which means only a single CPU. Internally, it was doing all this back and forth switching between threads, also known as context switching, it was doing it for ourselves. You might think that it’s actually fantastic because you’re handling more load.

What Threads Are

Hence, context switching takes place between the threads, which is an expensive task affecting the execution of the application. Structured concurrency aims to simplify multi-threaded and parallel programming. It treats multiple tasks running in different threads as a single unit of work, streamlining error handling and cancellation while improving reliability and observability. This helps to avoid issues like thread leaking and cancellation delays. Being an incubator feature, this might go through further changes during stabilization.

java project loom

Attend in-person or online at QCon London (March 27-29, 2023). Debugging is still challenging and the project Loom team is working with the various IDE vendors on how to present large numbers of threads. Kevlin Henney takes a look at six specific impossible things that shape the limits of what people can develop, from integer representation to the minefield of task estimation and prioritization. As a best practice, if a method is used very frequently and it uses a synchronized block then consider replacing it with the ReentrantLock mechanism.

It was supposed to be available in Java 17, we just got Java 18 and it’s still not there. I’m experimenting with Project Loom for quite some time already. InfoQ Live January Learn how to achieve high-level observability without picking and choosing which logs to collect. Sara Bergman introduces the field of green software engineering, showing options to estimate the carbon footprint and discussing ideas on how to make Machine Learning greener. The rest of the code is identical to the previous standard thread example.

Fibers, however, will have pluggable schedulers, and users will be able to write their own ones . Another relatively major design decision concerns thread locals. Currently, thread-local data is represented by the ThreadLocal class. Crucially, ThreadLocals have two very different uses. Another is to reduce contention in concurrent data structures with striping.

Continuations

This is just a minor addition to the API, and it may change. If you were to implement things in the naive way, you would observe the same piece of code running at the same time in two threads. Once on the virtual thread and once in the OS thread that’s underneath it, which is also a Java thread. And that didn’t work great in the debugger — you’d sort of stepped through breakpoints and stepped through two threads at a time. And that was very confusing and not at all the experience we wanted.

In fact, continuations don’t add expressivity on top of that of fibers (i.e., continuations can be implemented on top of fibers). Represent fibers as a Fiber class, and factor out the common API for Fiber and Thread into a common super-type, provisionally called Strand. Thread-implementation-agnostic code would be programmed against Strand, so that Strand.currentStrand would return a fiber if the code is running in a fiber, and Strand.sleep would suspend the fiber if the code is running in a fiber. JDK libraries making use of native code that blocks threads would need to be adapted to be able to run in fibers.

But with virtual threads, they’re cheap enough to just have a single thread per task. And I will say that we won’t have many other problems as well, because once the thread captures the notion of a task, working with them becomes much simpler. So even though you’ll have more threads, I believe that will make working with threads much, much, much easier than having fewer threads. Virtual threads are cheap enough to have a single thread per task, and eliminate many of the common issues with writing concurrent code in Java. There aren’t any new APIs you have to learn, but you do need to unlearn many habits such as using thread pools to deal with resource contention.

java project loom

If instead you create 4 virtual threads, you will basically do the same amount of work. It doesn’t mean that if you replace 4 virtual threads with 400 virtual threads, you will actually make your application faster, because after all, you do use the CPU. There’s not java project loom much hardware to do the actual work, but it gets worse. Because if you have a virtual thread that just keeps using the CPU, it will never voluntarily suspend itself, because it never reaches a blocking operation like sleeping, locking, waiting for I/O, and so on.

current community

Each thread has a separate flow of execution, and multiple threads are used to execute different parts of a task simultaneously. Usually, it is the operating system’s job to schedule and manage threads depending on the performance of the CPU. In this article, we will be looking into Project Loom and how this concurrent model works. We will be discussing the prominent parts of the model such as the virtual threads, Scheduler, Fiber class and Continuations. Java has had good multi-threading and concurrency capabilities from early on in its evolution and can effectively utilize multi-threaded and multi-core CPUs.

  • If fibers are represented by Threads, then some changes would need to be made to such striped data structures.
  • And the assumption there is that you won’t have too many stacks, but of course that assumption is broken with project Loom, because you might have a million stacks.
  • We would also want to obtain a fiber’s stack trace for monitoring/debugging as well as its state (suspended/running) etc..
  • They’re kind of like arrays, but their structure is still the same as that of a stack.
  • Establishing the memory visibility guarantees necessary for migrating continuations from one kernel thread to another is the responsibility of the fiber implementation.
  • Millions of fibers can be spawned in a single JVM instance, and programmers need not hesitate to issue synchronous, blocking calls, as blocking will be virtually free.

They are sleeping blocked on a synchronization mechanism, or waiting on I/O. It’s just a different way of performing or developing software. Do we have such frameworks and what problems https://globalcloudteam.com/ and limitations can we reach here? Before we move on to some high level constructs, so first of all, if your threads, either platform or virtual ones have a very deep stack.

Well, yes, But Usually We Use Threads From a Pool

This is a software construct that’s built into the JVM, or that will be built into the JVM. And if you have a million threads, it’s nicer to give the users a very clear mechanism of let’s say herding them. And that mechanism is based on the idea called structured concurrency.

What do you envisage Loom’s Plugable scheduler being used for?

But when it came to priorities, we decided that virtual threads can give more benefits sooner. We haven’t started working on it, we’ll start working on it only once we deliver virtual threads. And in the future, we hope that debuggers and profilers will present you with a stray view that even when you have a great many threads, you’ll at least be able to tell from that view what they’re doing. But one thing we already have today in project Loom is we have that mechanism for thread dumps. So you can get a thread dump from a running JVM today. And we didn’t want to just give you stack traces for a million threads, because it wouldn’t be useful.

Whenever the caller resumes the continuation after it is suspended, the control is returned to the exact point where it was suspended. A thread could be blocked from continuing if there is a delay in data to be read or written by an I/O task. This limits the working of threads and the number of threads an application can utilize.

Java Development Kit 1.1 had basic support for platform threads (or Operating System threads), and JDK 1.5 had more utilities and updates to improve concurrency and multi-threading. JDK 8 brought asynchronous programming support and more concurrency improvements. While things have continued to improve over multiple versions, there has been nothing groundbreaking in Java for the last three decades, apart from support for concurrency and multi-threading using OS threads. It helped me think of virtual threads as tasks, that will eventually run on a real thread⟨™) AND that need the underlying native calls to do the heavy non-blocking lifting.

Eventually, a lightweight concurrency construct is direly needed that does not make use of these traditional threads that are dependent on the Operating system. We want updateInventory() and updateOrder() subtasks to be executed concurrently. Ideally, the handleOrder() method should fail if any subtask fails.

A lack of definition for DevOps enabled early adopters but didn’t allow late-majority enterprises to be successful in their adoption of DevOps. The platform engineering community is in danger of repeating this mistake. It is suggested that there is no need to replace synchronized blocks and methods that are used infrequently (e.g., only performed at startup) or that guard in-memory operations. Virtual threads help in achieving the same high scalability and throughput as the asynchronous APIs with the same hardware configuration, without adding the syntax complexity. Obviously, those times are really hardware dependant, but those will be used as a reference to compare to the other running scenarios. Imagine that updateInventory() is an expensive long-running operation and updateOrder() throws an error.

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