Java Interview Questions & Answers for Experienced
Multithreading, Concurrency and Thread basics Questions :-
1) Can we make array volatile in Java?
This is one of the tricky Java multi-threading questions you will see in senior Java developer Interview. Yes, you can make an array volatile in Java but only the reference which is pointing to an array, not the whole array. What I mean, if one thread changes the reference variable to points to another array, that will provide a volatile guarantee, but if multiple threads are changing individual array elements they won’t be having happens before guarantee provided by the volatile modifier.
2) Can volatile make a non-atomic operation to atomic?
This another good question I love to ask on volatile, mostly as a follow-up of the previous question. This question is also not easy to answer because volatile is not about atomicity, but there are cases where you can use a volatile variable to make the operation atomic.
One example I have seen is having a long field in your class. If you know that a long field is accessed by more than one thread e.g. a counter, a price field or anything, you better make it volatile. Why? because reading to a long variable is not atomic in Java and done in two steps, If one thread is writing or updating long value, it’s possible for another thread to see half value (fist 32-bit). While reading/writing a volatile long or double (64 bit) is atomic.
3) What are practical uses of volatile modifier?
One of the practical use of the volatile variable is to make reading double and long atomic. Both double and long are 64-bit wide and they are read in two parts, first 32-bit first time and next 32-bit second time, which is non-atomic but volatile double and long read is atomic in Java. Another use of the volatile variable is to provide a memory barrier, just like it is used in Disrupter framework. Basically, Java Memory model inserts a write barrier after you write to a volatile variable and a read barrier before you read it. Which means, if you write to volatile field then it’s guaranteed that any thread accessing that variable will see the value you wrote and anything you did before doing that right into the thread is guaranteed to have happened and any updated data values will also be visible to all threads, because the memory barrier flushed all other writes to the cache.
4) What guarantee volatile variable provides?
volatile variables provide the guarantee about ordering and visibility e.g. volatile assignment cannot be re-ordered with other statements but in the absence of any synchronization instruction compiler, JVM or JIT are free to reorder statements for better performance. volatile also provides the happens-before guarantee which ensures changes made in one thread is visible to others. In some cases volatile also provide atomicity e.g. reading 64-bit data types like long and double are not atomic but read of volatile double or long is atomic.
5) Which one would be easy to write? synchronization code for 10 threads or 2 threads?
In terms of writing code, both will be of same complexity because synchronization code is independent of a number of threads. Choice of synchronization though depends upon a number of threads because the number of thread present more contention, so you go for advanced synchronization technique e.g. lock stripping, which requires more complex code and expertise.
6) How do you call wait() method? using if block or loop? Why?
wait() method should always be called in loop because it’s possible that until thread gets CPU to start running again the condition might not hold, so it’s always better to check condition in loop before proceeding.
7) What is false sharing in the context of multi-threading?
false sharing is one of the well-known performance issues on multi-core systems, where each process has its local cache. false sharing occurs when threads on different processor modify variables that reside on same cache line.
False sharing is very hard to detect because the thread may be accessing completely different global variables that happen to be relatively close together in memory. Like many concurrency issues, the primary way to avoid false sharing is careful code review and aligning your data structure with the size of a cache line.
8) What is busy spin? Why should you use it?
Busy spin is one of the technique to wait for events without releasing CPU. It’s often done to avoid losing data in CPU cached which is lost if the thread is paused and resumed in some other core. So, if you are working on low latency system where your order processing thread currently doesn’t have any order, instead of sleeping or calling wait(), you can just loop and then again check the queue for new messages. It’s only beneficial if you need to wait for a very small amount of time e.g. in micro seconds or nano seconds. LMAX Disrupter framework, a high-performance inter-thread messaging library has a BusySpinWaitStrategy which is based on this concept and uses a busy spin loop for EventProcessors waiting on the barrier.
9) How do you take thread dump in Java?
You can take a thread dump of Java application in Linux by using kill -3 PID, where PID is the process id of Java process. In Windows, you can press Ctrl + Break. This will instruct JVM to print thread dump in standard out or err and it could go to console or log file depending upon your application configuration. If you have used Tomcat then when
10) is Swing thread-safe?
No, Swing is not thread-safe. You cannot update Swing components e.g. JTable, JList or JPanel from any thread, in fact, they must be updated from GUI or AWT thread. That’s why swings provide invokeAndWait() and invokeLater() method to request GUI update from any other threads. This methods put update request in AWT threads queue and can wait till update or return immediately for an asynchronous update. You can also check the detailed answer to learn more.
