Differences with Conventional Collections

Security in Multithreading:

The advantage of synchronized collections lies in their ability to provide thread-safe methods by locking each method that modifies the collection. This locking mechanism prevents multiple threads from executing these methods simultaneously, which helps protect the collection from corruption caused by concurrent modifications.

In contrast, conventional collections lack this synchronization, making them vulnerable to errors and data corruption if multiple threads access and modify the collection at the same time.

Performance:

Performance of synchronized collections is slower due to the overhead from synchronization. Locking methods adds extra time to operations. Regular collections are faster in a single-threaded environment because they lack this overhead.

Application:

Synchronized collections are ideal for multi-threaded environments where protecting data during concurrent access is crucial. Regular collections are better for single-threaded applications or when multithreading is managed differently.

Note

The main problems that Synchronized Collections solve are all of the problems we covered in the last section (competitive data access, race condition, caching and data visibility).

When might they be needed?

Imagine a program that processes data from multiple sources simultaneously and stores the results in a shared list. Without synchronization, adding results to the shared list from different threads can lead to data loss or an incorrect list state. Synchronized collections allow you to safely add and retrieve items from the list regardless of the number of threads.