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Asked: 2026-05-13T06:00:49+00:00

I’ve a Java client which accesses our server side over HTTP making several small

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I’ve a Java client which accesses our server side over HTTP making several small requests to load each new page of data. We maintain a thread pool to handle all non UI processing, so any background client side tasks and any tasks which want to make a connection to the server. I’ve been looking into some performance issues and I’m not certain we’ve got our threadpool set up as well as possible. Currently we use a ThreadPoolExecutor with a core pool size of 8, we use a LinkedBlockingQueue for the work queue so the max pool size is ignored. No doubt there’s no simple do this certain thing in all situations answer, but are there any best practices. My thinking at the moment is

1) I’ll switch to using a SynchronousQueue instead of a LinkedBlockingQueue so the pool can grow to the max pool size figure.
2) I’ll set the max pool size to be unlimited.

Basically my current fear is that occasional performance issues on the server side are causing unrelated client side processing to halt due to the upper limit on the thread pool size. My fear with unbounding it is the additional hit on managing those threads on the client, possibly just the better of 2 evils.

Any suggestions, best practices or useful references?
Cheers,
Robin

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It sounds like you’d probably be better of limiting the queue size: does your application still behave properly when there are many requests queued (is it acceptable for all task to be queued for a long time, are some more important to others)? What happens if there are still queued tasks left and the user quits the application? If the queue growing very large, is there a chance that the server will catch-up (soon enough) to hide the problem completely from the user?

    I’d say create one queue for requests whose response is needed to update the user interface, and keep its queue very small. If this queue gets too big, notify the user.

    For real background tasks keep a separate pool, with a longer queue, but not infinite. Define graceful behavior for this pool when it grows or when the user wants to quit but there are tasks left, what should happen?

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