So basically what im trying to do is queue up tasks in a thread pool to be executed as soon as a worker becomes free, i have found various examples of this but in all cases the examples have been setup to use a new Worker instance for each job, i want persistent workers.

Im trying to make a ftp backup tool, i have it working but because of the limitations of a single connection it is slow. What i ideally want to do is have a single connection for scanning directories and building up a file list then four workers to download said files.

Here is an example of my worker

/**
 * FTP Worker
 */
public class Worker implements Runnable {
  protected FTPClient _ftp;

  // Connection details
  protected String _host = "";
  protected String _user = "";
  protected String _pass = "";

  // worker status
  protected boolean _working = false;

  public Worker(String host, String user, String pass) {
    this._host = host;
    this._user = user;
    this._pass = pass;
  }

   // Check if the worker is in use
  public boolean inUse() {
    return this._working;
  }

  @Override
  public void run() {
    this._ftp = new FTPClient();
    this._connect();
  }

  // Download a file from the ftp server
  public boolean download(String base, String path, String file) {
    this._working   = true;
    boolean outcome = true;

    //create directory if not exists
    File pathDir = new File(base + path);
    if (!pathDir.exists()) {
      pathDir.mkdirs();
    }

    //download file
    try {
      OutputStream output = new FileOutputStream(base + path + file);
      this._ftp.retrieveFile(file, output);
      output.close();
    } catch (Exception e) {
      outcome = false;
    } finally {
      this._working = false;
      return outcome;
    }
  }

  // Connect to the server
  protected boolean _connect() {
    try {
      this._ftp.connect(this._host);
      this._ftp.login(this._user, this._pass);
    } catch (Exception e) {
      return false;
    }
    return this._ftp.isConnected();
  }

  // Disconnect from the server
  protected void _disconnect() {
    try {
      this._ftp.disconnect();
    } catch (Exception e) { /* do nothing */ }
  }
}

and basically i want to be able to call Worker.download(...) for each task in a queue whenever a worker becomes available without having to create a new connection to the ftp server for each download

Any help would be appreciated as iv'e never used threads before and I'm going round in circles at the moment