Java memory model - can someone explain it?

Question

I'm not going to attempt to actually answer your questions here - instead I'll redirect you to the book which I seeing recommended for advice on this topic: Java Concurrency in Practice.

One word of warning: if there are answers here, expect quite a few of them to be wrong. One of the reasons I'm not going to post details is because I'm pretty sure I'd get it wrong in at least some respects. I mean no disrespect whatsoever to the community when I say that the chances of everyone who thinks they can answer this question actually having enough rigour to get it right is practically zero. (Joe Duffy recently found a bit of the .NET memory model that was surprised by. If he can get it wrong, so can mortals like us.)

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I will offer some insight on just one aspect, because it's often misunderstood:

There's a difference between volatility and atomicity. People often think that an atomic write is volatile (i.e. you don't need to worry about the memory model if the write is atomic). That's not true.

Volatility is about whether one thread performing a read (logically, in the source code) will "see" changes made by another thread.

Atomicity is about whether there is any chance that if a change is seen, only part of the change will be seen.

For instance, take writing to an integer field. That is guaranteed to be atomic, but not volatile. That means that if we have (starting at foo.x = 0):

Thread 1: foo.x = 257;
Thread 2: int y = foo.x;

It's possible for y to be 0 or 257. It won't be any other value, (e.g. 256 or 1) due to the atomicity constraint. However, even if you know that in "wall time" the code in thread 2 executed after the code in thread 1, there could be odd caching, memory accesses "moving" etc. Making the variable x volatile will fix this.

I'll leave the rest up to real honest-to-goodness experts.

• non-volatile variables can be cached thread-locally, so different threads may see different values at the same time; volatile prevents this (source)
• writes to variables of 32 bits or smaller are guaranteed to be atomic (implied here); not so for long and double, though 64bit JVMs probably implement them as atomic operations

I wont try to explain these issues here but instead refer you to Brian Goetz excellent book on the subject.

The book is "Java Concurrency in Practice", can be found at Amazon or any other well sorted store for computer literature.

This is a good link which can give you a little in depth information:

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~pugh/java/memoryModel/jsr-133-faq.html

I recently found an excellent article that explain volatile as:

First, you have to understand a little something about the Java memory model. I've struggled a bit over the years to explain it briefly and well. As of today, the best way I can think of to describe it is if you imagine it this way:

• Each thread in Java takes place in a separate memory space (this is clearly untrue, so bear with me on this one).

• You need to use special mechanisms to guarantee that communication happens between these threads, as you would on a message passing system.

• Memory writes that happen in one thread can "leak through" and be seen by another thread, but this is by no means guaranteed. Without explicit communication, you can't guarantee which writes get seen by other threads, or even the order in which they get seen.

The Java volatile modifier is an example of a special mechanism to guarantee that communication happens between threads. When one thread writes to a volatile variable, and another thread sees that write, the first thread is telling the second about all of the contents of memory up until it performed the write to that volatile variable.

Additional links: http://jeremymanson.blogspot.com/2008/11/what-volatile-means-in-java.html http://www.javaperformancetuning.com/news/qotm030.shtml