Ensuring task execution order in threadpool

Question

I have been reading about the thread-pool pattern and I can\'t seem to find the usual solution for the following problem.

I sometimes want tasks to be executed serial

Answer 1

You have two different kind of tasks. Mixing them up in a single queue feels rather odd. Instead of having one queue have two. For the sake of simplicity you could even use a ThreadPoolExecutor for both. For the serial tasks just give it a fixed size of 1, for the tasks that can be executed concurrently give it more. I don't see why that would be clumsy at all. Keep it simple and stupid. You have two different tasks so treat them accordingly.