Multiple newSingleThreadExecutor vs. newFixedThreadPool of ExecutorService

Question

In my application I have 4 distinct processes, which run permanently with some small pauses.

The current version of code executes each process in a separate old-school thread:

Thread nlpAnalyzer = new Thread(() -> {

    // infine lop for auto restore in case of crash
    //noinspection InfiniteLoopStatement
    while (true) {
        try {
            // this method should run permanently, pauses implemented internally
            NLPAnalyzer.analyzeNLP(dbCollection);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
});

nlpAnalyzer.setName("im_nlpAnalyzer");
nlpAnalyzer.start();

Now I would like to refactor this code with use of ExecutorService. In order to do that I can use at least two approaches:

• newFixedThreadPool(numOfProc);
• numOfProc * newSingleThreadExecutor().

My questions:

1. Is there any reason why I should prefer one option over another?
2. What is more accepted to generate a thread pool with X threads or generate X newSingleThreadExecutors?
3. Pro et contra of each of the approach?

Answer 1

Given each task is a infinite loop, what I would used is a

newCachedThreadPool();

This would create a thread for every task which needed it (and no more)

The benefit of using a single threaded pool each is you could shutdown the pool individually, or give each thread a name, but if you don't need this, it's just overhead.

Note: you can change the name of a thread with setName("My task") which might be useful for debugging/profiling purposes.

One of the tricks of using an ExecutorService is that it captures any uncaught exception/errors and places it in the Future object returned. Often this Future is discarded which means that if your task dies unexpectedly it might also do it silently.

I suggest you do a try/catch(Throwable) outside the loop and log it so you can see if the thread ever dies unexpectedly. e.g OutOfMemoryError