Java 9 Programming By Example

Starving

Starving is the situation when several threads are waiting for a resource trying to acquire a lock and some threads get access to the lock only after extremely long time or never. When the lock is released and there are threads waiting for it, then one of the threads can get the lock. There is usually no guarantee that a thread gets the lock if it waits long enough. Such a mechanism would require intensive administration of the threads, sorting them in the waiting queue. As locking should be a low latency and high performance action, even a few CPU clock cycles are significant; therefore, the locks do not provide this type of fair access by default. Not wasting time with fairness in thread scheduling is a good approach, in case the ...