Which Java blocking queue is most efficient for single-producer single-consumer scenarios

Question

I'm working on a standard Java system with critical timing requirements for my producers (1/100s of ms matters).

I have a producer placing stuff in a blocking queue, and a single consumer later picking up that stuff and dumping it to a file. The consumer blocks when data is not available.

Obviously, blocking queue is the appropriate interface, but which actual implementation should I choose if I want to minimize the cost to the producer? I wan to play as little as possible on things like locking and allocating when I am putting stuff in the queue, and I don't mind if the consumer has to wait a lot longer or work a lot harder.

Is there an implementation that can be faster because I only have a single consumer and single producer ?

Answer 1

Well, there really aren't too many options. Let me go through the listed subclasses:

DelayQueue, LinkedBlockingDeque, PriorityBlockingQueue, and SynchronousQueue are all made for special cases requiring extra functionality; they don't make sense in this scenario.

That leaves only ArrayBlockingQueue and LinkedBlockingQueue. If you know how to tell whether you need an ArrayList or a LinkedList, you can probably answer this one yourself.

Note that in LinkedBlockingQueue, "linked nodes are dynamically created upon each insertion"; this might tend to push you toward ArrayBlockingQueue.