I'm trying to understand how to take advantage of using multi threads. I wrote a simple program that increments the value of i, let's say, 400,000 times using two ways : a single threaded way (0 to 400,000) and a multiple threaded way (in my case, 4 times : 0 to 100,000) with the number of thread equal to Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors().
I'm surprised with the results I measured : the single threaded way is decidedly faster, sometimes 3 times faster. Here is my code :
public class Main {
public static int LOOPS = 100000;
private static ExecutorService executor=null;
public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException, ExecutionException {
int procNb = Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors();
long startTime;
long endTime;
executor = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(procNb);
ArrayList<Calculation> c = new ArrayList<Calculation>();
for (int i=0;i<procNb;i++){
c.add(new Calculation());
}
// Make parallel computations (4 in my case)
startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
queryAll(c);
endTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.out.println("Computation time using " + procNb + " threads : " + (endTime - startTime) + "ms");
startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
for (int i =0;i<procNb*LOOPS;i++)
{
}
endTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.out.println("Computation time using main thread : " + (endTime - startTime) + "ms");
}
public static List<Integer> queryAll(List<Calculation> queries) throws InterruptedException, ExecutionException {
List<Future<Integer>> futures = executor.invokeAll(queries);
List<Integer> aggregatedResults = new ArrayList<Integer>();
for (Future<Integer> future : futures) {
aggregatedResults.add(future.get());
}
return aggregatedResults;
}
}
class Calculation implements Callable<Integer> {
@Override
public Integer call() {
int i;
for (i=0;i<Main.LOOPS;i++){
}
return i;
}
}
Console :
Computation time using 4 threads : 10ms.
Computation time using main thread : 3ms.
Could anyone explain this ?
