Question

I’m writing a java GUI that performs certain operations through the serial port. Since I don’t want it to block while waiting for a response I figured having a thread do it was a better way, but now I’m faced with two options and I don’t know which would be more efficient:

• Case 1: Create a single thread for each asynchronous task.
• Case 2: Keep a single thread sleeping and have it perform different tasks by changing an atomic integer’s value and then interrupting it.

None of these operations will be processor intensive, but I still wonder if it’s wise to keep a thread in memory permanently.

Answer 1

I would use a single threaded ExecutorService like

private final ExecutorService service = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor();

service.submit(new Runnable() {
   public void run() {
       // task to perform here.
   }
});

You may want a different thread for reading and writing to the serial device.