What's the difference between ConcurrentHashMap and Collections.synchronizedMap(Map)?

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I have a Map which is to be modified by several threads concurrently.

There seem to be three different synchronized Map implementations in the Java API:

  • Hashtable
  • Collections.synchronizedMap(Map)
  • ConcurrentHashMap

From what I understand, Hashtable is an old implementation (extending the obsolete Dictionary class), which has been adapted later to fit the Map interface. While it is synchronized, it seems to have serious scalability issues and is discouraged for new projects.

But what about the other two? What are the differences between Maps returned by Collections.synchronizedMap(Map) and ConcurrentHashMaps? Which one fits which situation?

19 Answers

For your needs, use ConcurrentHashMap. It allows concurrent modification of the Map from several threads without the need to block them. Collections.synchronizedMap(map) creates a blocking Map which will degrade performance, albeit ensure consistency (if used properly).

Use the second option if you need to ensure data consistency, and each thread needs to have an up-to-date view of the map. Use the first if performance is critical, and each thread only inserts data to the map, with reads happening less frequently.

The "scalability issues" for Hashtable are present in exactly the same way in Collections.synchronizedMap(Map) - they use very simple synchronization, which means that only one thread can access the map at the same time.

This is not much of an issue when you have simple inserts and lookups (unless you do it extremely intensively), but becomes a big problem when you need to iterate over the entire Map, which can take a long time for a large Map - while one thread does that, all others have to wait if they want to insert or lookup anything.

The ConcurrentHashMap uses very sophisticated techniques to reduce the need for synchronization and allow parallel read access by multiple threads without synchronization and, more importantly, provides an Iterator that requires no synchronization and even allows the Map to be modified during interation (though it makes no guarantees whether or not elements that were inserted during iteration will be returned).

ConcurrentHashMap is preferred when you can use it - though it requires at least Java 5.

It is designed to scale well when used by multiple threads. Performance may be marginally poorer when only a single thread accesses the Map at a time, but significantly better when multiple threads access the map concurrently.

I found a blog entry that reproduces a table from the excellent book Java Concurrency In Practice, which I thoroughly recommend.

Collections.synchronizedMap makes sense really only if you need to wrap up a map with some other characteristics, perhaps some sort of ordered map, like a TreeMap.

As usual, there are concurrency--overhead--speed tradeoffs involved. You really need to consider the detailed concurrency requirements of your application to make a decision, and then test your code to see if it's good enough.

You are right about HashTable, you can forget about it.

Your article mentions the fact that while HashTable and the synchronized wrapper class provide basic thread-safety by only allowing one thread at a time to access the map, this is not 'true' thread-safety since many compound operations still require additional synchronization, for example:

synchronized (records) {
  Record rec = records.get(id);
  if (rec == null) {
      rec = new Record(id);
      records.put(id, rec);
  }
  return rec;
}

However, don't think that ConcurrentHashMap is a simple alternative for a HashMap with a typical synchronized block as shown above. Read this article to understand its intricacies better.

ConcurrentHashMap is optimized for concurrent access.

Accesses don't lock the whole map but use a finer grained strategy, which improves scalability. There are also functional enhanvements specifically for concurrent access, e.g. concurrent iterators.

ConcurrentHashMap was presented as alternative to Hashtable in Java 1.5 as part of concurrency package. With ConcurrentHashMap, you have a better choice not only if it can be safely used in the concurrent multi-threaded environment but also provides better performance than Hashtable and synchronizedMap. ConcurrentHashMap performs better because it locks a part of Map. It allows concurred read operations and the same time maintains integrity by synchronizing write operations.

How ConcurrentHashMap is implemented

ConcurrentHashMap was developed as alternative of Hashtable and support all functionality of Hashtable with additional ability, so called concurrency level. ConcurrentHashMap allows multiple readers to read simultaneously without using blocks. It becomes possible by separating Map to different parts and blocking only part of Map in updates. By default, concurrency level is 16, so Map is spitted to 16 parts and each part is managed by separated block. It means, that 16 threads can work with Map simultaneously, if they work with different parts of Map. It makes ConcurrentHashMap hight productive, and not to down thread-safety.

If you are interested in some important features of ConcurrentHashMap and when you should use this realization of Map - I just put a link to a good article - How to use ConcurrentHashMap in Java

Besides what has been suggested, I'd like to post the source code related to SynchronizedMap.

To make a Map thread safe, we can use Collections.synchronizedMap statement and input the map instance as the parameter.

The implementation of synchronizedMap in Collections is like below

   public static <K,V> Map<K,V> synchronizedMap(Map<K,V> m) {
        return new SynchronizedMap<>(m);
    }

As you can see, the input Map object is wrapped by the SynchronizedMap object.
Let's dig into the implementation of SynchronizedMap ,

 private static class SynchronizedMap<K,V>
        implements Map<K,V>, Serializable {
        private static final long serialVersionUID = 1978198479659022715L;

        private final Map<K,V> m;     // Backing Map
        final Object      mutex;        // Object on which to synchronize

        SynchronizedMap(Map<K,V> m) {
            this.m = Objects.requireNonNull(m);
            mutex = this;
        }

        SynchronizedMap(Map<K,V> m, Object mutex) {
            this.m = m;
            this.mutex = mutex;
        }

        public int size() {
            synchronized (mutex) {return m.size();}
        }
        public boolean isEmpty() {
            synchronized (mutex) {return m.isEmpty();}
        }
        public boolean containsKey(Object key) {
            synchronized (mutex) {return m.containsKey(key);}
        }
        public boolean containsValue(Object value) {
            synchronized (mutex) {return m.containsValue(value);}
        }
        public V get(Object key) {
            synchronized (mutex) {return m.get(key);}
        }

        public V put(K key, V value) {
            synchronized (mutex) {return m.put(key, value);}
        }
        public V remove(Object key) {
            synchronized (mutex) {return m.remove(key);}
        }
        public void putAll(Map<? extends K, ? extends V> map) {
            synchronized (mutex) {m.putAll(map);}
        }
        public void clear() {
            synchronized (mutex) {m.clear();}
        }

        private transient Set<K> keySet;
        private transient Set<Map.Entry<K,V>> entrySet;
        private transient Collection<V> values;

        public Set<K> keySet() {
            synchronized (mutex) {
                if (keySet==null)
                    keySet = new SynchronizedSet<>(m.keySet(), mutex);
                return keySet;
            }
        }

        public Set<Map.Entry<K,V>> entrySet() {
            synchronized (mutex) {
                if (entrySet==null)
                    entrySet = new SynchronizedSet<>(m.entrySet(), mutex);
                return entrySet;
            }
        }

        public Collection<V> values() {
            synchronized (mutex) {
                if (values==null)
                    values = new SynchronizedCollection<>(m.values(), mutex);
                return values;
            }
        }

        public boolean equals(Object o) {
            if (this == o)
                return true;
            synchronized (mutex) {return m.equals(o);}
        }
        public int hashCode() {
            synchronized (mutex) {return m.hashCode();}
        }
        public String toString() {
            synchronized (mutex) {return m.toString();}
        }

        // Override default methods in Map
        @Override
        public V getOrDefault(Object k, V defaultValue) {
            synchronized (mutex) {return m.getOrDefault(k, defaultValue);}
        }
        @Override
        public void forEach(BiConsumer<? super K, ? super V> action) {
            synchronized (mutex) {m.forEach(action);}
        }
        @Override
        public void replaceAll(BiFunction<? super K, ? super V, ? extends V> function) {
            synchronized (mutex) {m.replaceAll(function);}
        }
        @Override
        public V putIfAbsent(K key, V value) {
            synchronized (mutex) {return m.putIfAbsent(key, value);}
        }
        @Override
        public boolean remove(Object key, Object value) {
            synchronized (mutex) {return m.remove(key, value);}
        }
        @Override
        public boolean replace(K key, V oldValue, V newValue) {
            synchronized (mutex) {return m.replace(key, oldValue, newValue);}
        }
        @Override
        public V replace(K key, V value) {
            synchronized (mutex) {return m.replace(key, value);}
        }
        @Override
        public V computeIfAbsent(K key,
                Function<? super K, ? extends V> mappingFunction) {
            synchronized (mutex) {return m.computeIfAbsent(key, mappingFunction);}
        }
        @Override
        public V computeIfPresent(K key,
                BiFunction<? super K, ? super V, ? extends V> remappingFunction) {
            synchronized (mutex) {return m.computeIfPresent(key, remappingFunction);}
        }
        @Override
        public V compute(K key,
                BiFunction<? super K, ? super V, ? extends V> remappingFunction) {
            synchronized (mutex) {return m.compute(key, remappingFunction);}
        }
        @Override
        public V merge(K key, V value,
                BiFunction<? super V, ? super V, ? extends V> remappingFunction) {
            synchronized (mutex) {return m.merge(key, value, remappingFunction);}
        }

        private void writeObject(ObjectOutputStream s) throws IOException {
            synchronized (mutex) {s.defaultWriteObject();}
        }
    }

What SynchronizedMap does can be summarized as adding a single lock to primary method of the input Map object. All method guarded by the lock can't be accessed by multiple threads at the same time. That means normal operations like put and get can be executed by a single thread at the same time for all data in the Map object.

It makes the Map object thread safe now but the performance may become an issue in some scenarios.

The ConcurrentMap is far more complicated in the implementation, we can refer to Building a better HashMap for details. In a nutshell, it's implemented taking both thread safe and performance into consideration.

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