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/Blocking Queue | Bounded Buffer | Consumer Producer
Blocking Queue | Bounded Buffer | Consumer Producer
Classical synchronization problem involving a limited size buffer which can have items added to it or removed from it by different producer and consumer threads. This problem is known by different names: blocking queue problem, bounded buffer problem or consumer producer problem.
We'll cover the following...
Blocking Queue | Bounded Buffer | Consumer Producer
A blocking queue is defined as a queue which blocks the caller of the enqueue method if there's no more capacity to add the new item being enqueued. Similarly, the queue blocks the dequeue caller if there are no items in the queue. Also, the queue notifies a blocked enqueuing thread when space becomes available and a blocked dequeuing thread when an item becomes available in the queue.
Solution
The bounded buffer is a classic textbook concurrency problem. We'll look at the various ways we can implement such a buffer.
Our queue will have a finite size that is passed in via the constructor. Additionally, we'll use an integer array as the data structure for backing our queue. We choose to use a simple integer array to make the example easier to follow. However, a solution with a generic container would follow the same underlying logic.
Furthermore, we'll expose two APIs in our blocking queue class:
producer()consumer()
We'll always add an element to the end of the array and remove ...