How does ConcurrentHashMap work internally?

I was reading the official Oracle documentation about Concurrency in Java and I was wondering what could be the difference between a Collection returned by

public static <T> Collection<T> synchronizedCollection(Collection<T> c);

and using for example a

ConcurrentHashMap . I'm assuming that I use synchronizedCollection(Collection<T> c) on a HashMap . I know that in general a synchronized collection is essentially just a decorator for my HashMap so it is obvious that a ConcurrentHashMap has something different in its internals. Do you have some information about those implementation details?

Edit: I realized that the source code is publicly available: ConcurrentHashMap.java


I would read the source of ConcurrentHashMap as it is rather complicated in the detail. In short it has

  • Multiple partitions which can be locked independently. (16 by default)
  • Using concurrent Locks operations for thread safety instead of synchronized.
  • Has thread safe Iterators. synchronizedCollection's iterators are not thread safe.
  • Does not expose the internal locks. synchronizedCollection does.

  • The ConcurrentHashMap is very similar to the java.util.HashTable class, except that ConcurrentHashMap offers better concurrency than HashTable or synchronizedMap does. ConcurrentHashMap does not lock the Map while you are reading from it. Additionally, ConcurrentHashMap does not lock the entire Map when writing to it. It only locks the part of the Map that is being written to, internally.

    Another difference is that ConcurrentHashMap does not throw ConcurrentModificationException if the ConcurrentHashMap is changed while being iterated. The Iterator is not designed to be used by more than one thread though whereas synchronizedMap may throw ConcurrentModificationException


    This is the article that helped me understand it Why ConcurrentHashMap is better than Hashtable and just as good as a HashMap

    Hashtable's offer concurrent access to their entries, with a small caveat, the entire map is locked to perform any sort of operation. While this overhead is ignorable in a web application under normal load, under heavy load it can lead to delayed response times and overtaxing of your server for no good reason.

    This is where ConcurrentHashMap's step in. They offer all the features of Hashtable with a performance almost as good as a HashMap. ConcurrentHashMap's accomplish this by a very simple mechanism. Instead of a map wide lock, the collection maintains a list of 16 locks by default, each of which is used to guard (or lock on) a single bucket of the map. This effectively means that 16 threads can modify the collection at a single time (as long as they're all working on different buckets). Infact there is no operation performed by this collection that locks the entire map. The concurrency level of the collection, the number of threads that can modify it at the same time without blocking, can be increased. However a higher number means more overhead of maintaining this list of locks.

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