When should you prefer race conditions and visibility and when should you avoid it?

Race conditions and visibility in Java are critical concepts in multithreading. Understanding when to prefer or avoid them can significantly impact the performance and correctness of your application.

When to Avoid Race Conditions

Race conditions occur when two or more threads access shared data and try to change it at the same time. This can lead to unpredictable behavior and bugs that are difficult to trace. Here are some scenarios where you should avoid race conditions:

• When data integrity is crucial, such as in monetary transactions or banking systems.
• In safety-critical applications like medical devices or automotive systems.
• When the state of an object is not designed to be shared across threads.

When to Prefer Race Conditions

In some cases, you may prefer to accept race conditions for the sake of performance. These situations typically involve:

• Highly concurrent access patterns where the cost of locks would severely degrade performance.
• Processes where the risks of race conditions are manageable or can be mitigated by the application logic.

Java Example

Using synchronized blocks can help manage race conditions and ensure data visibility: