How LongAdder performs better than AtomicLong

Question

I see how Java's AtomicInteger works internally with CAS (Compare And Swap) operation. Basically when multiple threads try to update the value, JVM internally use the underlying CAS mechanism and try to update the value. If the update fails, then try again with the new value but never blocks.

In Java8 Oracle introduced a new Class LongAdder which seems to perform better than AtomicInteger under high contention. Some blog posts claim that LongAdder perform better by maintaining internal cells - does that mean LongAdder aggregates the values internally and update it later? Could you please help me to understand how LongAdder works?

Answer 1

does that mean LongAdder aggregates the values internally and update it later?

Yes, if I understand your statement correctly.

Each Cell in a LongAdder is a variant of an AtomicLong. Having multiple such cells is a way of spreading out the contention and thus increasing throughput.

When the final result (sum) is to be retrieved, it just adds together the values of each cell.

Much of the logic around how the cells are organized, how they are allocated etc can be seen in the source: http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk9/jdk9/jdk/file/f398670f3da7/src/java.base/share/classes/java/util/concurrent/atomic/Striped64.java

In particular the number of cells is bound by the number of CPUs:

/** Number of CPUS, to place bound on table size */
static final int NCPU = Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors();