What's the difference between ConcurrentHashMap and Collections.synchronizedMap(Map)?

Question

I have a Map which is to be modified by several threads concurrently.

There seem to be three different synchronized Map implementations in the Java API:

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Answer 1

There is one critical feature to note about ConcurrentHashMap other than concurrency feature it provides, which is fail-safe iterator. I have seen developers using ConcurrentHashMap just because they want to edit the entryset - put/remove while iterating over it. Collections.synchronizedMap(Map) does not provide fail-safe iterator but it provides fail-fast iterator instead. fail-fast iterators uses snapshot of the size of map which can not be edited during iteration.