Advanced Java Programming - Old Questions

12. Why synchronization in essential in multithreading? Describe. (5) 

Synchronization is a process of handling resource accessibility by multiple thread requests. The main purpose of synchronization is to avoid thread interference. At times when more than one thread try to access a shared resource, we need to ensure that resource will be used by only one thread at a time. The process by which this is achieved is called synchronization. 

If we do not use synchronization, and let two or more threads access a shared resource at the same time, it will lead to distorted results.

Consider an example, Suppose we have two different threads T1 and T2, T1 starts execution and save certain values in a file temporary.txt which will be used to calculate some result when T1 returns. Meanwhile, T2 starts and before T1 returns, T2 change the values saved by T1 in the file temporary.txt (temporary.txt is the shared resource). Now obviously T1 will return wrong result.

To prevent such problems, synchronization was introduced. With synchronization in above case, once T1 starts using temporary.txt file, this file will be locked(LOCK mode), and no other thread will be able to access or modify it until T1 returns.