Controlling race condition at startup.

Posted by Will Hartung on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Will Hartung
Published on 2010-05-20T21:21:42Z Indexed on 2010/05/20 22:10 UTC
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I have some code that I want to have some one time initialisation performed. But this code doesn't have a definite lifecycle, so my logic can be potentially invoked by multiple threads before my initialisation is done. So, I want to basically ensure that my logic code "waits" until initialisation is done.

This is my first cut.

public class MyClass {
    private static final AtomicBoolean initialised = new AtomicBoolean(false);

    public void initialise() {
        synchronized(initialised) {
            initStuff();
            initialised.getAndSet(true);
            initialised.notifyAll();
        }
    }

    public void doStuff() {
        synchronized(initialised) {
            if (!initialised.get()) {
                try {
                    initialised.wait();
                } catch (InterruptedException ex) {
                    throw new RuntimeException("Uh oh!", ex);
                }
            }
        }

        doOtherStuff();
    }
}

I basically want to make sure this is going to do what I think it's going to do -- block doStuff until the initialised is true, and that I'm not missing a race condition where doStuff might get stuck on a Object.wait() that will never arrive.

Edit:

I have no control over the threads. And I want to be able to control when all of the initialisation is done, which is why doStuff() can't call initialise().

I used an AtomicBoolean as it was a combination of a value holder, and an object I could synchronize. I could have also simply had a "public static final Object lock = new Object();" and a simple boolean flag. AtomicBoolean conveniently gave me both. A Boolean can not be modified.

The CountDownLatch is exactly what I was looking for. I also considered using a Sempahore with 0 permits. But the CountDownLatch is perfect for just this task.

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