What is the most frequent concurrency issue you’ve encountered in Java? [closed]

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This is a poll of sorts about common concurrency problems in Java. An example might be the classic deadlock or race condition or perhaps EDT threading bugs in Swing. I’m interested both in a breadth of possible issues but also in what issues are most common. So, please leave one specific answer of a Java concurrency bug per comment and vote up if you see one you’ve encountered.

49 Answers
49

My #1 most painful concurrency problem ever occurred when two different open source libraries did something like this:

private static final String LOCK = "LOCK";  // use matching strings 
                                            // in two different libraries

public doSomestuff() {
   synchronized(LOCK) {
       this.work();
   }
}

At first glance, this looks like a pretty trivial synchronization example. However; because Strings are interned in Java, the literal string "LOCK" turns out to be the same instance of java.lang.String (even though they are declared completely disparately from each other.) The result is obviously bad.

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