Multithreading a massive file read

Question

I\'m still in the process of wrapping my brain around how concurrency works in Java. I understand that (if you\'re subscribing to the OO Java 5 concurrency model) you implem

Answer 1

you implement a Task or Callable with a run() or call() method (respectively), and it behooves you to parallelize as much of that implemented method as possible.

A Task represents a discrete unit of work
Loading a file into memory is a discrete unit of work and can therefore this activity can be delegated to a background thread. I.e. a background thread runs this task of loading the file.
It is a discrete unit of work since it has no other dependencies needed in order to do its job (load the file) and has discrete boundaries.
What you are asking is to further divide this into task. I.e. a thread loads 1/3 of the file while another thread the 2/3 etc.
If you were able to divide the task into further subtasks then it would not be a task in the first place by definition. So loading a file is a single task by itself.

To give you an example:
Let's say that you have a GUI and you need to present to the user data from 5 different files. To present them you need also to prepare some data structures to process the actual data.
All these are separate tasks.
E.g. the loading of files is 5 different tasks so could be done by 5 different threads.
The preparation of the data structures could be done a different thread.
The GUI runs of course in another thread.
All these can happen concurrently