I recently tackled the classic Producer-Consumer problem using Java and multithreading. This problem is a fundamental example in concurrent programming, showcasing how producers and consumers can work together while sharing a common buffer.
🧵 What is the Producer-Consumer Problem? In the Producer-Consumer problem, we have two types of threads:
Producers: Generate data and add it to a shared buffer. Consumers: Take data from the shared buffer and process it. The challenge is to ensure that producers don't overflow the buffer and consumers don't try to consume from an empty buffer.
🔧 My Solution I implemented this problem using three different approaches in Java:
Using Object as a Lock: Leveraging intrinsic locks with synchronized blocks.
Runnable Interface: Implementing the Runnable interface for producer and consumer classes.
Thread Class: Extending the Thread class for producer and consumer classes.
💡 Key Concepts Thread Safety: Ensuring that shared resources are accessed by one thread at a time.
Synchronization: Using intrinsic locks and condition variables to manage thread execution.
Concurrency Handling: Addressing potential issues like race conditions and deadlocks.