Question

Say I am 1000 pop emails that I have to pull emails from.

I want to create a service, that utilizes muliple threads so I can pull email from multiple pop3 servers at the same time (as oppose to a serialized process).

How would I go about doing this?

Answer 1

Use ThreadPoolExecutor.

Description of ThreadPoolExecutor from API doc:

public class ThreadPoolExecutor extends AbstractExecutorService

An ExecutorService that executes each
submitted task using one of possibly
several pooled threads, normally
configured using Executors factory
methods.

Thread pools address two different
problems: they usually provide
improved performance when executing
large numbers of asynchronous tasks,
due to reduced per-task invocation
overhead, and they provide a means of
bounding and managing the resources,
including threads, consumed when
executing a collection of tasks. Each
ThreadPoolExecutor also maintains some
basic statistics, such as the number
of completed tasks.

Here is simple tutorial for understanding same.

Some more links to understand same:

http://programmingexamples.wikidot.com/threadpoolexecutor