Practical uses for AtomicInteger

Question

I sort of understand that AtomicInteger and other Atomic variables allow concurrent accesses  In what cases is this class typically used though

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For example  I have a library that generates instances of some class  Each of these instances must have a unique integer ID  as these instances represent commands being sent to a server  and each command must have a unique ID  Since multiple threads are allowed to send commands concurrently  I use an AtomicInteger to generate those IDs  An alternative approach would be to use some sort of lock and a regular integer  but that s both slower and less elegant

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Like gabuzo said  sometimes I use AtomicIntegers when I want to pass an int by reference   It s a built-in class that has architecture-specific code  so it s easier and likely more optimized than any MutableInteger I could quickly code up   That said  it feels like an abuse of the class

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I usually use AtomicInteger when I need to give Ids to objects that can be accesed or created from multiple threads  and i usually use it as an static attribute on the class that i access in the constructor of the objects

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The absolute simplest example I can think of is to make incrementing an atomic operation   With standard ints   private volatile int counter   public int getNextUniqueIndex         return counter       Not atomic  multiple threads could get the same result     With AtomicInteger   private AtomicInteger counter   public int getNextUniqueIndex         return counter getAndIncrement        The latter is a very simple way to perform simple mutations effects  especially counting  or unique-indexing   without having to resort to synchronizing all access   More complex synchronization-free logic can be employed by using compareAndSet   as a type of optimistic locking - get the current value  compute result based on this  set this result iff value is still the input used to do the calculation  else start again - but the counting examples are very useful  and I ll often use AtomicIntegers for counting and VM-wide unique generators if there s any hint of multiple threads being involved  because they re so easy to work with I d almost consider it premature optimisation to use plain ints   While you can almost always achieve the same synchronization guarantees with ints and appropriate synchronized declarations  the beauty of AtomicInteger is that the thread-safety is built into the actual object itself  rather than you needing to worry about the possible interleavings  and monitors held  of every method that happens to access the int value   It s much harder to accidentally violate threadsafety when calling getAndIncrement   than when returning i   and remembering  or not  to acquire the correct set of monitors beforehand

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I used AtomicInteger to solve the Dining Philosopher s problem   In my solution  AtomicInteger instances were used to represent the forks  there are two needed per philosopher  Each Philosopher is identified as an integer  1 through 5  When a fork is used by a philosopher  the AtomicInteger holds the value of the philosopher  1 through 5  otherwise the fork is not being used so the value of the AtomicInteger is -1    The AtomicInteger then allows to check if a fork is free  value  -1  and set it to the owner of the fork if free  in one atomic operation  See code below   AtomicInteger fork0   neededForks 0    neededForks is an array that holds the forks needed per Philosopher AtomicInteger fork1   neededForks 1   while true           if  Hungry              if fork is free    -1  then grab it by denoting who took it         if   fork0 compareAndSet -1  p      fork1 compareAndSet -1  p                 at least one fork was not succesfully grabbed  release both and try again later             fork0 compareAndSet p  -1               fork1 compareAndSet p  -1               try                   synchronized  lock     sleep and get notified later when a philosopher puts down one fork                                         lock wait     try again later  goes back up the loop                                 catch  InterruptedException e                else                 sucessfully grabbed both forks             transition fork l free and fork r free                       Because the compareAndSet method does not block  it should increase throughput  more work done  As you may know  the Dining Philosophers problem is used when controlled accessed to resources is needed  i e  forks  are needed  like a process needs resources to continue doing work

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If you look at the methods AtomicInteger has  you ll notice that they tend to correspond to common operations on ints   For instance   static AtomicInteger i      Later  in a thread int current   i incrementAndGet      is the thread-safe version of this   static int i      Later  in a thread int current     i    The methods map like this    i is i incrementAndGet   i   is i getAndIncrement   --i is i decrementAndGet   i-- is i getAndDecrement   i   x is i set x  x   i is x   i get      There are other convenience methods as well  like compareAndSet or addAndGet

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The key is that they allow concurrent access and modification safely  They re commonly used as counters in a multithreaded environment - before their introduction this had to be a user written class that wrapped up the various methods in synchronized blocks

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You can implement non-blocking locks using compareAndSwap  CAS  on atomic integers or longs  The  Tl2  Software Transactional Memory paper describes this      We associate a special versioned write-lock with every transacted   memory location  In its simplest form  the versioned write-lock is a   single word spinlock that uses a CAS operation to acquire the lock and   a store to release it  Since one only needs a single bit to indicate   that the lock is taken  we use the rest of the lock word to hold a   version number    What it is describing is first read the atomic integer  Split this up into an ignored lock-bit and the version number  Attempt to CAS write it as the lock-bit cleared with the current version number to the lock-bit set and the next version number  Loop until you succeed and your are the thread which owns the lock  Unlock by setting the current version number with the lock-bit cleared   The paper describes using the version numbers in the locks to coordinate that threads have a consistent set of reads when they write   This article describes that processors have hardware support for compare and swap operations making the very efficient   It also claims      non-blocking CAS-based counters using atomic variables have better   performance than lock-based counters in low to moderate contention

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Simple example for compareAndSet   function   import java util concurrent atomic AtomicInteger    public class GFG        public static void main String args                        Initially value as 0          AtomicInteger val   new AtomicInteger 0                Prints the updated value          System out println  Previous value                                 val                Checks if previous value was 0             and then updates it          boolean res   val compareAndSet 0  6                Checks if the value was updated           if  res               System out println  The value was                                     updated and it is                                val            else             System out println  The value was                                     not updated                     The printed is   previous value  0 The value was updated and it is 6 Another simple example       import java util concurrent atomic AtomicInteger    public class GFG        public static void main String args                        Initially value as 0          AtomicInteger val                new AtomicInteger 0                Prints the updated value          System out println  Previous value                                 val                 Checks if previous value was 0             and then updates it          boolean res   val compareAndSet 10  6                  Checks if the value was updated             if  res               System out println  The value was                                     updated and it is                                    val            else             System out println  The value was                                     not updated                 The printed is   Previous value  0 The value was not updated

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In Java 8 atomic classes have been extended with two interesting functions    int getAndUpdate IntUnaryOperator updateFunction  int updateAndGet IntUnaryOperator updateFunction    Both are using the updateFunction to perform update of the atomic value  The difference is that the first one returns old value and the second one return the new value  The updateFunction may be implemented to do more complex  compare and set  operations than the standard one  For example it can check that atomic counter doesn t go below zero  normally it would require synchronization  and here the code is lock-free       public class Counter          private final AtomicInteger number         public Counter int number            this number   new AtomicInteger number                       return true if still can decrease          public boolean dec                updateAndGet fn  executed atomically          return number updateAndGet n - gt   n  gt  0    n - 1   n   gt  0                  The code is taken from Java Atomic Example

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The primary use of AtomicInteger is when you are in a multithreaded context and you need to perform thread safe operations on an integer without using synchronized  The assignation and retrieval on the primitive type int are already atomic but AtomicInteger comes with many operations which are not atomic on int   The simplest are the getAndXXX or xXXAndGet  For instance getAndIncrement   is an atomic equivalent to i   which is not atomic because it is actually a short cut for three operations  retrieval  addition and assignation  compareAndSet is very useful to implements semaphores  locks  latches  etc   Using the AtomicInteger is faster and more readable than performing the same using synchronization   A simple test   public synchronized int incrementNotAtomic         return notAtomic       public void performTestNotAtomic         final long start   System currentTimeMillis        for  int i   0   i  lt  NUM   i              incrementNotAtomic              System out println  Not atomic     System currentTimeMillis   - start       public void performTestAtomic         final long start   System currentTimeMillis        for  int i   0   i  lt  NUM   i              atomic getAndIncrement              System out println  Atomic     System currentTimeMillis   - start        On my PC with Java 1 6 the atomic test runs in 3 seconds while the synchronized one runs in about 5 5 seconds  The problem here is that the operation to synchronize  notAtomic    is really short  So the cost of the synchronization is really important compared to the operation   Beside atomicity AtomicInteger can be use as a mutable version of Integer for instance in Maps as values

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There are two main uses of AtomicInteger    As an atomic counter  incrementAndGet    etc  that can be used by many threads concurrently As a primitive that supports compare-and-swap instruction  compareAndSet    to implement non-blocking algorithms    Here is an example of non-blocking random number generator from Brian G  etz s Java Concurrency In Practice   public class AtomicPseudoRandom extends PseudoRandom       private AtomicInteger seed      AtomicPseudoRandom int seed            this seed   new AtomicInteger seed              public int nextInt int n            while  true                int s   seed get                int nextSeed   calculateNext s               if  seed compareAndSet s  nextSeed                     int remainder   s   n                  return remainder  gt  0   remainder   remainder   n                                            As you can see  it basically works almost the same way as incrementAndGet    but performs arbitrary calculation  calculateNext    instead of increment  and processes the result before return

[java] Practical uses for AtomicInteger

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