Java Thread Programming

Chapter 13. Thread Pooling

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Benefits of Thread Pooling

• Considerations and Costs of Thread Pooling

• A Generic Thread Pool: ThreadPool

• A Specialized Worker Thread Pool: HttpServer

When design situations arise that could benefit by using many short-lived threads, thread pooling is a useful technique. Rather than create a brand new thread for each task, you can have one of the threads from the thread pool pulled out of the pool and assigned to the task. When the thread is finished with the task, it adds itself back to the pool and waits for another assignment.

In this chapter, I present two examples that use thread pooling. One creates a pool of threads that can be generically used to run Runnable objects. The other creates a pool of threads ...