The only guide you’ll need on concurrency & multithreading for senior engineers. Pressure test your skills with real-world practice problems from top companies.

Concurrency in Java is one of the most complex and advanced topics brought up during senior engineering interviews. Knowledge of concurrency and multithreading can put interviewees at a considerable advantage. This course lays the foundations of advanced concurrency and multithreading and explains concepts such as Monitors and Deferred Callbacks in depth. It also builds simple and complete solutions to popular concurrency problems that can be asked about in interviews like the Reader-Writer Problem and the Dining Philosopher Problem. While prior knowledge of concurrency is not required to follow through with this course, familiarity with the very basics of concurrency would be helpful.

Java Multithreading for Senior Engineering Interviews

Executors are based on consumer-producer patterns. The tasks we produce for processing are consumed by threads. To better our understanding of how threads behave, imagine you are hired by a hedge fund on Wall Street and you are asked to design a method that can process client purchase orders as soon as possible. Let's see what are the possible ways to design this method.

# Sequential Approach
The method simply accepts an order and tries to execute it. The method blocks other requests till it has completed processing the current request.


```java
 void receiveAndExecuteClientOrders() {

 while (true) {
 Order order = waitForNextOrder();
 order.execute();
 }
 }
```

You'll write the above code if you have never worked with concurrency. It sequentially processes each buy order and will not be responsive or have acceptable throughput.

# Unbounded Thread Approach
A newbie would fix the code above like so:


```java
 void receiveAndExecuteClientOrdersBetter() {

 while (true) {
 final Order order = waitForNextOrder();

 Thread thread = new Thread(new Runnable() {

 public void run() {
 order.execute();
 }
 });
 
 thread.start();
 }
 }
```

The above approach is an improvement over the sequential approach. The program now accepts an order and spawns off a thread to handle the order execution. The problem, however, is that now the application spawns off an unlimited number of threads. Creating threads without bound is not a wise approach for the following reasons:
<ul>
<li>Thread creation and teardown isn't for free.</li>
<li>Active threads consume memory even if they are idle. If there are less number of processors than threads then several of them will sit idle tying up memory.</li>
<li>There is usually a limit imposed by JVM and the underlying OS on the number of threads that can be created.</li>
</ul>
Note that the above improvement may still make the application unresponsive. Imagine if several hundred requests are received between the time it takes for the method to receive an order request and spawn off a thread to deal with the request. In such a scenario, the method will end up with a growing backlog of requests and may cause the program to crash. 

The next lesson introduces Threadpools which mitigate several of the issues we discussed here.

The Basics

Multithreading in Java

Java's Memory Model

Interview Practice Problems

Bonus Questions

Beyond the Interview

Java Concurrency Reference

Revision & Quizzes

Executor Implementations