What is a race condition?

Question

When writing multithreaded applications, one of the most common problems experienced is race conditions.

My questions to the community are:

What is the rac

Answer 1

You can prevent race condition, if you use "Atomic" classes. The reason is just the thread don't separate operation get and set, example is below:

AtomicInteger ai = new AtomicInteger(2);
ai.getAndAdd(5);

As a result, you will have 7 in link "ai". Although you did two actions, but the both operation confirm the same thread and no one other thread will interfere to this, that means no race conditions!

Answer 2

A race condition is an undesirable situation that occurs when two or more process can access and change the shared data at the same time.It occurred because there were conflicting accesses to a resource . Critical section problem may cause race condition. To solve critical condition among the process we have take out only one process at a time which execute the critical section.

Answer 3

What is a Race Condition?

You are planning to go to a movie at 5 pm. You inquire about the availability of the tickets at 4 pm. The representative says that they are available. You relax and reach the ticket window 5 minutes before the show. I'm sure you can guess what happens: it's a full house. The problem here was in the duration between the check and the action. You inquired at 4 and acted at 5. In the meantime, someone else grabbed the tickets. That's a race condition - specifically a "check-then-act" scenario of race conditions.

How do you detect them?

Religious code review, multi-threaded unit tests. There is no shortcut. There are few Eclipse plugin emerging on this, but nothing stable yet.

How do you handle and prevent them?

The best thing would be to create side-effect free and stateless functions, use immutables as much as possible. But that is not always possible. So using java.util.concurrent.atomic, concurrent data structures, proper synchronization, and actor based concurrency will help.

The best resource for concurrency is JCIP. You can also get some more details on above explanation here.

Answer 4

A race condition is a situation on concurrent programming where two concurrent threads or processes compete for a resource and the resulting final state depends on who gets the resource first.

Answer 5

Here is the classical Bank Account Balance example which will help newbies to understand Threads in Java easily w.r.t. race conditions:

public class BankAccount {

/**
 * @param args
 */
int accountNumber;
double accountBalance;

public synchronized boolean Deposit(double amount){
    double newAccountBalance=0;
    if(amount<=0){
        return false;
    }
    else {
        newAccountBalance = accountBalance+amount;
        accountBalance=newAccountBalance;
        return true;
    }

}
public synchronized boolean Withdraw(double amount){
    double newAccountBalance=0;
    if(amount>accountBalance){
        return false;
    }
    else{
        newAccountBalance = accountBalance-amount;
        accountBalance=newAccountBalance;
        return true;
    }
}

public static void main(String[] args) {
    // TODO Auto-generated method stub
    BankAccount b = new BankAccount();
    b.accountBalance=2000;
    System.out.println(b.Withdraw(3000));

}

Answer 6

You don't always want to discard a race condition. If you have a flag which can be read and written by multiple threads, and this flag is set to 'done' by one thread so that other thread stop processing when flag is set to 'done', you don't want that "race condition" to be eliminated. In fact, this one can be referred to as a benign race condition.

However, using a tool for detection of race condition, it will be spotted as a harmful race condition.

More details on race condition here, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc546569.aspx.