Detecting concurrent modifications?

Question

In a multi-threaded application I'm working on, we occasionally see ConcurrentModificationExceptions on our Lists (which are mostly ArrayList, sometimes Vectors). But there are other times when I think concurrent modifications are happening because iterating through the collection appears to be missing items, but no exceptions are thrown. I know that the docs for ConcurrentModificationException says you can't rely on it, but how would I go about making sure I'm not concurrently modifying a List? And is wrapping every access to the collection in a synchronized block the only way to prevent it?

Update: Yes, I know about Collections.synchronizedCollection, but it doesn't guard against somebody modifying the collection while you're iterating through it. I think at least some of my problem is happening when somebody adds something to a collection while I'm iterating through it.

Second Update If somebody wants to combine the mention of the synchronizedCollection and cloning like Jason did with a mention of the java.util.concurrent and the apache collections frameworks like jacekfoo and Javamann did, I can accept an answer.

Answer 1

Depending on your update frequency one of my favorites is the CopyOnWriteArrayList or CopyOnWriteArraySet. They create a new list/set on updates to avoid concurrent modification exception.

Answer 2

Your original question seems to be asking for an iterator that sees live updates to the underlying collection while remaining thread-safe. This is an incredibly expensive problem to solve in the general case, which is why none of the standard collection classes do it.

There are lots of ways of achieving partial solutions to the problem, and in your application, one of those may be sufficient.

Jason gives a specific way to achieve thread safety, and to avoid throwing a ConcurrentModificationException, but only at the expense of liveness.

Javamann mentions two specific classes in the java.util.concurrent package that solve the same problem in a lock-free way, where scalability is critical. These only shipped with Java 5, but there have been various projects that backport the functionality of the package into earlier Java versions, including this one, though they won't have such good performance in earlier JREs.

If you are already using some of the Apache Commons libraries, then as jacekfoo points out, the apache collections framework contains some helpful classes.

You might also consider looking at the Google collections framework.