Question

My code has a data structure shared between many threads, but I am using LinkedBlockingQueue, so would synchronized be necessary at all in the following code?

public synchronized String getDirectory(){
    return directoryArray.poll();
}

Answer 1

I dont think you required extra synchronization. According to docs – link

BlockingQueue implementations are
thread-safe. All queuing methods
achieve their effects atomically using
internal locks or other forms of
concurrency control. However, the bulk
Collection operations addAll,
containsAll, retainAll and removeAll
are not necessarily performed
atomically unless specified otherwise
in an implementation. So it is
possible, for example, for addAll(c)
to fail (throwing an exception) after
adding only some of the elements in
c.