Robust and Scalable Concurrent Programming: Lessons from the Trenches
TS-4620

Writing thread-safe and concurrent code is a central element in today's programming on the Java platform. Multicore systems are now a firm trend in enterprise Java technology, but software often turns out to be a bottleneck in harnessing the full power of these systems. Highly concurrent software is critical in achieving scalability, yet writing correct thread-safe and concurrent code remains a surprisingly difficult task for many developers.

While working with a big code base and numerous developers at eBay, the speakers see several problematic patterns and errors repeated over and over again in the area of concurrent programming. In tackling these issues, they have accumulated several important solutions and lessons that have proven to be useful and applicable in most of these situations.

This session presents some of the most frequent "antipatterns" that are incorrect or not scalable (or both) and suggests solutions to them. It focuses on concrete examples and provides practical solutions and considerations drawn from these examples. The presentation also discusses how applying these practices and lessons has resulted in substantial scalability improvements at eBay, the world's largest e-commerce Web deployment.