Java.util.concurrent Synchronizers

Internal

• java.util.concurrent

CountDownLatch

External

• https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/CountDownLatch.html

Overview

A CountDownLatch is a synchronization tool that allows one or more threads to wait on it until a certain number of operations being performed in other threads completes. The latch is initialized with a count. Any thread calling await() blocks unit the count reaches zero, after which it is released. You can think of those threads as waiting on a gate to open. The count is decremented with countDown(), which can be called in a loop from a single thread, or concurrently from multiple threads. Note that the threads invoking countDown() are not blocked on the latch - they decrement and continue.

Once the count reached zero, the latch cannot be reused. If you need a reusable mechanism, use Cyclic Barrier.

CyclicBarrier

A cyclic barrier is a primitive useful when waiting for all threads in a group to finish work they are doing individually.

int threadCount = ...;

final CyclicBarrier barrier = new CyclicBarrier(threadCount, () -> System.out.print("ALL threads have finished"));

for(int i = 0; i < threadCount; i ++) {

    new Thread(() ->  {

        // do stuff ...

        try {

          barrier.await();
        }
        catch(Exception e)  {

            log.error("barrier error", e);

        }
    }, "Thread #" + i).start();
}