Book Image

Oracle JRockit: The Definitive Guide

Book Image

Oracle JRockit: The Definitive Guide

Overview of this book

Oracle JRockit is one of the industry’s highest performing Java Virtual Machines. Java developers are always on the lookout for better ways to analyze application behavior and gain performance. As we all know, this is not as easy as it looks. Welcome to JRockit: The Definitive Guide.This book helps you gain in-depth knowledge of Java from the JVM’s point of view. We will explain how to write code that works well with the JVM to gain performance and scalability. Starting with the inner workings of the JRockit JVM and finishing with a thorough walkthrough of the tools in the JRockit Mission Control suite, this book is for anyone who wants to know more about how the JVM executes your Java application and how to profile for better performance.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Oracle JRockit
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
Preface
12
Using the JRockit Management APIs
Bibliography
Glossary
AST
CAS
HIR
IR
JFR
JMX
JRA
JSR
LIR
MD5
MIR
PDE
RCP
SWT
TLA
Index

Chapter 4. Threads and Synchronization

This chapter covers threads and synchronization in Java and in the Java Virtual Machine. Threads are the de facto mechanism for running several parallel tasks in a process. Locks are the de facto mechanism for constraining access to a critical section of code to one thread at a time. These are the building blocks we need in order to implement parallelism in software.

You will learn the following from this chapter:

  • How fundamental parallel concepts such as threads and synchronization work in Java and how the Java APIs can be used for synchronization. This includes concepts like wait, notify, and the often misunderstood volatile keyword. We will also briefly look at the java.util.concurrent package.

  • The concept of the Java Memory Model, and why it is required. Understanding the memory model is the key to writing working multithreaded Java programs.

  • How the JVM can efficiently implement threads and synchronization and a discussion about a few different models...