Java Fork/Join

Programmers have been lucky the in past. Since processor speed has been increasing, their code would run faster without modification. Now the focus is on multi-core systems so the performance increase is not just given to the programmer. They have to modify their code to work on multiple cores in order to increase performance.

What I thought was the most interesting part of this framework is the idea of stealing work. I really never thought about it before but it makes perfect sense. Instead of waiting to be told to do a task, the process just takes some work from another. However this process is costly because of the synchronization issue so it is still important to balance the work among the available workers.

I have never worked directly with worker thread pools in my work. I have used systems that have them but I never touched that part of the code or needed to add another worker. I can definitely see the the benefit of using this framework on small tasks.