Java NIO

Chapter 4. Selectors

Life is a series of rude awakenings.

—R. Van Winkle

In this chapter, we’ll explore selectors. Selectors provide the ability to do readiness selection, which enables multiplexed I/O. As described in Chapter 1, readiness selection and multiplexing make it possible for a single thread to efficiently manage many I/O channels simultaneously. C/C++ coders have had the POSIX select( ) and/or poll( ) system calls in their toolbox for many years. Most other operating systems provide similar functionality. But readiness selection was never available to Java programmers until JDK 1.4. Programmers whose primary body of experience is in the Java environment may not have encountered this I/O model before.

For an illustration of readiness selection, let’s return to the drive-through bank example of Chapter 3. Imagine a bank with three drive-through lanes. In the traditional (nonselector) scenario, imagine that each drive-through lane has a pneumatic tube that runs to its own teller station inside the bank, and each station is walled off from the others. This means that each tube (channel) requires a dedicated teller (worker thread). This approach doesn’t scale well and is wasteful. For each new tube (channel) added, a new teller is required, along with associated overhead such as tables, chairs, paper clips (memory, CPU cycles, context switching), etc. And when things are slow, these resources (which have associated costs) tend to sit idle.

Now imagine a different scenario ...