Hi

I have a need for a counter of type long with the following requirements/facts:

• Incrementing the counter should take as little time as possible.
• The counter will only be written to by one thread.
• Reading from the counter will be done in another thread.
• The counter will be incremented regularly (as much as a few thousand times per second), but will only be read once every five seconds.
• Precise accuracy isn't essential, only a rough idea of the size of the counter is good enough.
• The counter is never cleared, decremented.

Based upon these requirements, how would you choose to implement your counter? As a simple long, as a volatile long or using an AtomicLong? Why?

At the moment I have a volatile long but was wondering whether another approach would be better. I am also incrementing my long by doing ++counter as opposed to counter++. Is this really any more efficient (as I have been led to believe elsewhere) because there is no assignment being done?

Thanks in advance

Rich