Question

Does it make sense to use a ThreadPool with a poolsize of just 1 to basically just recycle that one thread over and over again for different uses in the application? Rather then doing new Thread(Runnable()) etc and then letting the garbage collector handle the removal of the thread, I thought it would be more efficient to just use that one thread for different jobs that dont need to run together.

This is what I am currently doing to define 1 poolsize threadpool.

    private static int poolSize = 1;
private static int maxPoolSize = 1;
private static long keepAliveTime= 10;
private static final ArrayBlockingQueue<Runnable> queue = new ArrayBlockingQueue<Runnable>(100);
private static ThreadPoolExecutor threadPool = new ThreadPoolExecutor(poolSize, maxPoolSize, keepAliveTime, TimeUnit.SECONDS, queue);

Answer 1

There is nothing wrong with a single threaded thread pool if it fits with how you application should function. For example, in an application I work on we have a number of services where we need to ensure that data is strictly processed in order of arrival. To do this we simply execute tasks on a single threaded executor.

Also using Executors means that it is easy to adjust the thread pool parameters in the future if you need to.