Multithreading best practices : constraining tasks newFixedThreadPool

Question

I want to launch a lot of tasks to run on a database of +-42Mio records. I want to run this in batches of 5000 records/time (results in 850 tasks). I also want to limit the

Answer 1

You don't need to the part after the call to submit. The code you have that creates a Thread will result in 900 threads being created! Yowza. The ExecutorService has a pool of 16 threads and you can run 16 jobs at once. Any jobs submitted when all 16 threads are busy will be queued. From the docs:

Creates a thread pool that reuses a fixed number of threads operating off a shared unbounded queue. At any point, at most nThreads threads will be active processing tasks. If additional tasks are submitted when all threads are active, they will wait in the queue until a thread is available. If any thread terminates due to a failure during execution prior to shutdown, a new one will take its place if needed to execute subsequent tasks. The threads in the pool will exist until it is explicitly shutdown.

So there is no need for yet another thread. If you need to be notified after a task has finished you can have it call out. Other options are to cache all of the Future's returned from submit, and upon each task being finished you can check to see if all Future's are done. After all Future's are finished you can dispatch another function to run. But it will run ON one of the threads in the ExecutorService.