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I think of myself as a pretty decent developer, however when it comes to multithreading I'm a total n00b. I mean the only multithreading I've done at work was the very basic stuff like spawning off multiple threads using the ThreadPool to do some background work. No synchronization was necessary, and there was never any need to create threads manually.
So, my question is this; I want to write some application that will need to be heavily multithreaded and that will need to do all of the advanced things like synchronization etc.. I just can't think of anything to write. I've thought of maybe trying to write my own ThreadPool, but I think I need to learn to walk before I can run. So what ideas can anyone suggest? It doesn't have to have any real world useage, it can be totally pointless and worthless, but I just want to get better. I've read tons of articles and tutorials on all the theory, but the only way to REALLY get better is by doing. So, any ideas?
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We can achieve basic functionality of a thread by extending Thread class because it provides some inbuilt methods like yield(), interrupt() etc. that are not available in Runnable interface. Using runnable will give you an object that can be shared amongst multiple threads.
Multithreading decreases performance in the sense that it increases the total CPU time required to perform a task. However, it increases performance in the sense that it (usually, and depending on the task's characteristics) reduces the wall clock time that is required to perform the task.
Multithreading allows the execution of multiple parts of a program at the same time. These parts are known as threads and are lightweight processes available within the process. So multithreading leads to maximum utilization of the CPU by multitasking.
Is that enough?
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How about some kind of pointless batch-processing app? Generate a horrendous amount of data in a single thread and dump it out to a file, then start splitting the work off into threads of differing sizes and dumping them out to another file, time them and compare the files at the end to ensure the order is the same. This would get you into multi-threading, locking, mutexes and what not and also show the benefits of multithreading certain tasks vs. processing in a single thread.
First thing that popped into my head. Could be dull and/or pointless, but don't shoot the messenger! :)
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I think you should draw attention for this books:
Excelent articles by Herb Sutter (Herb, we all waiting for your new book!)
Effective Concurrency series
Some blogs:
P.S. How about Power Threading as an example of multithreading (and ThreadPool implementation)?
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