Re: Fixed size CopyOnWriteArrayList vs array concurrent access.

Your colleague has an incorrect understanding.

Because the backing array is effectively immutable (not modified after 
publication), for readers it only needs to be locked briefly to 
guarantee visibility of the reference the the array.  (In fact, the 
implementation can do even better than that, but the point is that 
multiple threads can iterate the list concurrently.)

The cost comes when you want to modify the list.  Then the list has to 
be copied; if modifications are frequent, this can have significant 
costs.  (In a naive implementation, newly arriving readers may be locked 
out during the copy operation, but there are tricks to prevent this.) 
COW structures are useful when reads greatly outnumber writes or the 
size of the collection is small.

Eugene Gordienko wrote:
>  Hi All,
> 
> We use java 1.4. We have a use case: fixed size array of objects and need 
> concurrent access to its elements: almost even number of reads and
> writes, also some iterations. The size may be less than 10 but may be more 
> than 100.
> 
> So my choice was fixed size CopyOnWriteArrayList (COWAL) ...  but my 
> collegues'  argument  is: when we wrie to COWAL the chunk of it is locked
> while in case of array of objects we can lock just on one array element.
> 
> What is your experience/suggestion?
> 
> Many thanks,
> Eugene
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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