I'm developing a circular buffer with two Threads: Consumer and Producer.
I'm using active waiting with Thread.yield.
I know that it is possible to do that with semaphores, but I wanted the buffer without semaphores.
Both have a shared variable: bufferCircular.
While the buffer is not full of useful information, producer write data in the position pof array, and while there are some useful information consumer read data in the position c of array. The variable nElem from BufferCircular is the number of value datas that haven't been read yet.
The program works quite good 9/10 times that runs. Then, sometimes, it get stucks in a infinite loop before show the last element on screen (number 500 of loop for), or just dont' show any element.
I think is probably a liveLock, but I can't find the mistake.
Shared Variable:
public class BufferCircular {
volatile int[] array;
volatile int p;
volatile int c;
volatile int nElem;
public BufferCircular(int[] array) {
this.array = array;
this.p = 0;
this.c = 0;
this.nElem = 0;
}
public void writeData (int data) {
this.array[p] = data;
this.p = (p + 1) % array.length;
this.nElem++;
}
public int readData() {
int data = array[c];
this.c = (c + 1) % array.length;
this.nElem--;
return data;
}
}
Producer Thread:
public class Producer extends Thread {
BufferCircular buffer;
int bufferTam;
int contData;
public Productor(BufferCircular buff) {
this.buffer = buff;
this.bufferTam = buffer.array.length;
this.contData = 0;
}
public void produceData() {
this.contData++;
this.buffer.writeData(contData);
}
public void run() {
for (int i = 0; i < 500; i++) {
while (this.buffer.nElem == this.bufferTam) {
Thread.yield();
}
this.produceData();
}
}
}
Consumer Thread:
public class Consumer extends Thread {
BufferCircular buffer;
int cont;
public Consumer(BufferCircular buff) {
this.buffer = buff;
this.cont = 0;
}
public void consumeData() {
int data = buffer.readData();
cont++;
System.out.println("data " + cont + ": " + data);
}
public void run() {
for (int i = 0; i < 500; i++) {
while (this.buffer.nElem == 0) {
Thread.yield();
}
this.consumeData();
}
}
}
Main:
public class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Random ran = new Random();
int tamArray = ran.nextInt(21) + 1;
int[] array = new int[tamArray];
BufferCircular buffer = new BufferCircular(array);
Producer producer = new Producer (buffer);
Consumer consumer = new Consumer (buffer);
producer.start();
consumer.start();
try {
producer.join();
consumer.join();
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
System.err.println("Error with Threads");
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
Any help will be welcome.
Your problem here is that your BufferCircular methods are sensitive to race conditions. Take for example writeData(). It executes in 3 steps, some of which are also not atomic:
this.array[p] = data; // 1
this.p = (p + 1) % array.length; // 2 not atomic
this.nElem++; // 3 not atomic
Suppose that 2 threads entered writeData() at the same time. At step 1, they both have the same p value, and both rewrite array[p] value. Now, array[p] is rewritten twice and data that first thread had to write, is lost, because second thread wrote to the same index after. Then they execute step 2--and result is unpredictable since p can be incremented by 1 or 2 (p = (p + 1) % array.length consists of 3 operations, where threads can interact). Then, step 3. ++ operator is also not atomic: it uses 2 operations behind the scenes. So nElem becomes also incremented by 1 or 2.
So we have fully unpredictable result. Which leads to poor execution of your program.
The simplest solution is to make readData() and writeData() methods serialized. For this, declare them synchronized:
public synchronized void writeData (int data) { //...
public synchronized void readData () { //...
If you have only one producer and one consumer threads, race conditions may occur on operations involving nElem. Solution is to use AtomicInteger instead of int:
final AtomicInteger nElem = new AtomicInteger();
and use its incrementAndGet() and decrementAndGet() methods.