Which is “better”. AtomicIntegerArray (1/0 as true/false) versus AtomicBoolean[]?

Question

I am very curious about that. If you use AtomicIntegerArray with values 0 and 1 you can accomplish the same thing of an AtomicBoolean array. Example:

final Atomi         


        

Answer 1

Actually watching the implementation of AtomicIntegerArray

http://fuseyism.com/classpath/doc/java/util/concurrent/atomic/AtomicIntegerArray-source.html

it seem that it is managed with more attention then I thought.

It doesn't use Objects to store the values, making it more efficient in memory. In fact it uses a simple int[] and then access them in a safe way.

So I think that if you need to use many AtomicInteger it is better to use the AtomicIntegerArray.

AtomicIntegerArray: uses the Unsafe class to make atomic access to a single int[] in the AtomicIntegerArray

AtomicBoolean[]: every single object of the array has it's object(itself) for making atomic access

So I would expect a better performance in a heavy concurrent threaded environment with an AtomicBoolean[], with more memory consumption than the AtomicIntegerArray.