Here is my code,
class Shared {
private static int index = 0;
public synchronized void printThread() {
try {
while(true) {
Thread.sleep(1000);
System.out.println(Thread.currentThread().getName() + ": " + index++);
notifyAll();
// notify();
wait();
}
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
class Example13 implements Runnable {
private Shared shared = new Shared();
@Override
public void run() {
shared.printThread();
}
}
public class tetest {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Example13 r = new Example13();
Thread t1 = new Thread(r, "Thread 1");
Thread t2 = new Thread(r, "Thread 2");
Thread t3 = new Thread(r, "Thread 3");
Thread t4 = new Thread(r, "Thread 4");
Thread t5 = new Thread(r, "Thread 5");
t1.start();
t2.start();
t3.start();
t4.start();
t5.start();
}
}
and the result is here
Thread 1: 0
Thread 5: 1
Thread 4: 2
Thread 3: 3
Thread 2: 4
Thread 3: 5
Thread 2: 6
Thread 3: 7
Thread 2: 8
Thread 3: 9
the question is, why only two of the threads are working? I'm so confused, I thought notify() is randomly wake up one of the waiting threads, but it's not.
is this starvation? then, why the starvation is caused? I tried notify() and notifyAll(), but got same results for both.
Can any one help my toasted brain?
This isn't 'starvation'. Your 5 threads are all doing nothing. They all want to 'wake up' - notify() will wake up an arbitrary one. It is neither unreliably random: The JMM does not ascribe an order to this, so one of them will wake up, you can't rely on it being random (do not use this to generate random numbers), nor can you rely on specific ordering behaviour.
It's not starvation (it's not: Oh no! Thread 2 and 3 are doing all the work and 4 and 5 are just hanging out doing nothing! That's bad - the system could be more efficient!) - because it doesn't matter which thread 'does the work'. A CPU core is a CPU core, it cares not which thread it ends up running.
Starvation is a different principle. Imagine instead of Thread.sleep (which means the threads aren't waiting for anything specific, other than some time to elapse), instead the threads want to print the result of some expensiv-ish math operation. If you just let 2 threads each say 'Hello!', then the impl of System.out says that it would be acceptable for the JVM to produce:
HelHellloo!!
So to prevent this, you use locks to create a 'talking stick' of sorts: A thread only gets to print if it has the talking stick. Each of 5 threads will all perform, in a loop, the following operation:
Now imagine that, despite the fact that the math operation is quite expensive, for whatever reason you have an excruciatingly slow terminal, and the 'print the result of the operation' job takes a really long time to finish.
Now you can run into starvation. Imagine this scenario:
Threads 1-5 all do their expensive math simultaneously.
Arbitrarily, thread 4 ends up nabbing the talking stick.
The other 4 threads soon too want the talking stick but they have to wait; t4 has it. They do nothing now. Twiddling their thumbs (they could be calculating, but they are not!)
after the excruciatingly long time, 4 is done and releases the stick. 1, 2, 3, and 5 dogpile on like its the All-Blacks and 2 so happens to win the scrum and crawls out of the pile with the stick. 1, 3, and 5 gnash their teeth and go back yet again to waiting for the stick, still not doing any work. Whilst 2 is busy spending the really long time printing results, 4 goes back to the top of the loop and calculates another result. It ends up doing this faster than 2 manages to print, so 4 ends up wanting the talking stick again before 2 is done.
2 is finally done and 1, 3, 4, and 5 all scrum into a pile again. 4 happens to get the stick - java makes absolutely no guarantees about fairness, any one of them can get it, there is also no guarantee of randomness or lack thereof. A JVM is not broken if 4 is destined to win this fight.
Repeat ad nauseam. 2 and 4 keep trading the stick back and forth. 1, 3, and 5 never get to talk.
The above is, as per the JMM, valid - a JVM is not broken if it behaves like this (it would be a tad weird). Any bugs filed about this behaviour would be denied: The lock isn't so-called "fair". Java has fair locks if you want them - in the java.util.concurrent package. Fair locks incur some slight extra bookkeeping cost, the assumption made by the synchronized and wait/notify system is that you don't want to pay this extra cost.
A better solution to the above scenario is possibly to make a 6th thread that JUST prints, with 5 threads JUST filling a buffer, at least then the 'print' part is left to a single thread and that might be faster. But mostly, the bottleneck in this getup is simply that printing - the code has zero benefit from being multicore (just having ONE thread do ONE math calculation, print it, do another, and so forth would be better. Or possibly 2 threads: Whilst printing, the other thread calculates a number, but there's no point in having more than one; even a single thread can calculate faster than results can be printed). Thus in some ways this is just what the situation honestly requires: This hypothetical scenario still prints as fast as it can. IF you need the printing to be 'fair' (and who says that? It's not intrinsic to the problem description that fairness is a requirement. Maybe all the various calculations are equally useful so it doesn't matter that one thread gets to print more than others; let's say its bitcoin miners, generating a random number and checking if that results in a hash with the requisite 7 zeroes at the end or whatever bitcoin is up to now - who cares that one thread gets more time than another? A 'fair' system is no more likely to successfully mine a block).
Thus, 'fairness' is something you need to explicitly determine you actually need. If you do, AND starvation is an issue, use a fair lock. new ReentrantLock(true) is all you need (that boolean parameter is the fair parameter - true means you want fairness).