How does AtomicInteger / AtomicReference impact performance or memory usage?

AtomicInteger and AtomicReference are part of the Java concurrency utilities that provide a way to perform atomic operations on integers and reference types, respectively. They offer a means of reducing synchronization overhead for multi-threaded environments.

When using AtomicInteger or AtomicReference, performance tends to improve in scenarios where contention among threads is high. This is because they allow lock-free thread-safe operations which minimize the wait time for threads competing to update a shared resource. However, they may use more memory compared to regular variables due to their internal structure and the additional overhead of maintaining atomicity.

In cases of low contention, the overhead introduced by Atomic types may lead to slightly reduced performance compared to using synchronized blocks or methods, which are simpler for low-level synchronization tasks.

// Example of using AtomicInteger AtomicInteger atomicInt = new AtomicInteger(0); // Incrementing the atomic integer int incrementedValue = atomicInt.incrementAndGet(); // Example of using AtomicReference AtomicReference atomicRef = new AtomicReference<>("Initial Value"); // Setting a new value String previousValue = atomicRef.getAndSet("New Value");

AtomicInteger AtomicReference performance memory usage thread-safe concurrency Java

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