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What is the purpose of the volatile keyword in Java?

Anubhav Sharma 740 18 Jul 2024

What is the purpose of the volatile keyword in Java?

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Updated 18 Jul 2024
Anubhav Sharma
Anubhav Sharma

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1 Answers

Ravi Vishwakarma
Ravi Vishwakarma 18 Jul 2024
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The volatile keyword in Java is used to indicate that a variable's value will be modified by different threads. It ensures that changes to the variable are always visible to other threads, providing a lightweight synchronization mechanism.

Here's a detailed explanation of its purpose and usage:

Visibility: When a variable is declared as volatile, it guarantees that any thread that reads the field will see the most recently written value. This is because the value of a volatile variable is always read from and written to the main memory, bypassing the local cache.

Atomicity: The volatile keyword ensures visibility but does not guarantee atomicity. Operations on volatile variables are not atomic, which means operations like incrementing a variable (count++) are not thread-safe with volatile alone. If you need atomicity, you should use synchronized blocks or classes from the java.util.concurrent.atomic package (e.g., AtomicInteger).

Instruction Reordering: The Java Memory Model allows the JVM to reorder instructions for performance optimization. However, volatile prevents certain types of reordering, ensuring a happens-before relationship between the write and read of the volatile variable. This means that changes made by one thread before writing to a volatile the variable is visible to other threads that subsequently read that volatile variable.

Example -

public class VolatileExample {
    private volatile boolean running = true;

    public void stop() {
        running = false;
    }

    public void run() {
        while (running) {
            // perform some work
        }
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        VolatileExample example = new VolatileExample();

        Thread t1 = new Thread(example::run);
        t1.start();

        // Let the thread run for a while
        try {
            Thread.sleep(1000);
        } catch (InterruptedException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

        // Stop the running thread
        example.stop();
    }
}

When to Use volatile

Use volatile when you need to ensure visibility of changes to variables across threads, but only if:

  • The variable is accessed by multiple threads.
  • The variable is not involved in compound actions (like count++), which require atomicity.
  • You need to avoid the overhead of synchronization for simple flags or state indicators.
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