Practical uses for AtomicInteger

Question

There are two main uses of AtomicInteger:

• As an atomic counter (incrementAndGet(), etc) that can be used by many threads concurrently

• As a primitive that supports compare-and-swap instruction (compareAndSet()) to implement non-blocking algorithms.

  Here is an example of non-blocking random number generator from Brian Göetz's Java Concurrency In Practice:

  public class AtomicPseudoRandom extends PseudoRandom {
      private AtomicInteger seed;
      AtomicPseudoRandom(int seed) {
          this.seed = new AtomicInteger(seed);
      }
  
      public int nextInt(int n) {
          while (true) {
              int s = seed.get();
              int nextSeed = calculateNext(s);
              if (seed.compareAndSet(s, nextSeed)) {
                  int remainder = s % n;
                  return remainder > 0 ? remainder : remainder + n;
              }
          }
      }
      ...
  }
  

  As you can see, it basically works almost the same way as incrementAndGet(), but performs arbitrary calculation (calculateNext()) instead of increment (and processes the result before return).

The absolute simplest example I can think of is to make incrementing an atomic operation.

With standard ints:

private volatile int counter;

public int getNextUniqueIndex() {
    return counter++; // Not atomic, multiple threads could get the same result
}

With AtomicInteger:

private AtomicInteger counter;

public int getNextUniqueIndex() {
    return counter.getAndIncrement();
}

The latter is a very simple way to perform simple mutations effects (especially counting, or unique-indexing), without having to resort to synchronizing all access.

More complex synchronization-free logic can be employed by using compareAndSet() as a type of optimistic locking - get the current value, compute result based on this, set this result iff value is still the input used to do the calculation, else start again - but the counting examples are very useful, and I'll often use AtomicIntegers for counting and VM-wide unique generators if there's any hint of multiple threads being involved, because they're so easy to work with I'd almost consider it premature optimisation to use plain ints.

While you can almost always achieve the same synchronization guarantees with ints and appropriate synchronized declarations, the beauty of AtomicInteger is that the thread-safety is built into the actual object itself, rather than you needing to worry about the possible interleavings, and monitors held, of every method that happens to access the int value. It's much harder to accidentally violate threadsafety when calling getAndIncrement() than when returning i++ and remembering (or not) to acquire the correct set of monitors beforehand.

If you look at the methods AtomicInteger has, you'll notice that they tend to correspond to common operations on ints. For instance:

static AtomicInteger i;

// Later, in a thread
int current = i.incrementAndGet();

is the thread-safe version of this:

static int i;

// Later, in a thread
int current = ++i;

The methods map like this:
++i is i.incrementAndGet()
i++ is i.getAndIncrement()
--i is i.decrementAndGet()
i-- is i.getAndDecrement()
i = x is i.set(x)
x = i is x = i.get()

There are other convenience methods as well, like compareAndSet or addAndGet

The primary use of AtomicInteger is when you are in a multithreaded context and you need to perform thread safe operations on an integer without using synchronized. The assignation and retrieval on the primitive type int are already atomic but AtomicInteger comes with many operations which are not atomic on int.

The simplest are the getAndXXX or xXXAndGet. For instance getAndIncrement() is an atomic equivalent to i++ which is not atomic because it is actually a short cut for three operations: retrieval, addition and assignation. compareAndSet is very useful to implements semaphores, locks, latches, etc.

Using the AtomicInteger is faster and more readable than performing the same using synchronization.

A simple test:

public synchronized int incrementNotAtomic() {
    return notAtomic++;
}

public void performTestNotAtomic() {
    final long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
    for (int i = 0 ; i < NUM ; i++) {
        incrementNotAtomic();
    }
    System.out.println("Not atomic: "+(System.currentTimeMillis() - start));
}

public void performTestAtomic() {
    final long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
    for (int i = 0 ; i < NUM ; i++) {
        atomic.getAndIncrement();
    }
    System.out.println("Atomic: "+(System.currentTimeMillis() - start));
}

On my PC with Java 1.6 the atomic test runs in 3 seconds while the synchronized one runs in about 5.5 seconds. The problem here is that the operation to synchronize (notAtomic++) is really short. So the cost of the synchronization is really important compared to the operation.

Beside atomicity AtomicInteger can be use as a mutable version of Integer for instance in Maps as values.

For example, I have a library that generates instances of some class. Each of these instances must have a unique integer ID, as these instances represent commands being sent to a server, and each command must have a unique ID. Since multiple threads are allowed to send commands concurrently, I use an AtomicInteger to generate those IDs. An alternative approach would be to use some sort of lock and a regular integer, but that's both slower and less elegant.