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Thinking in Java
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Yielding

If you know that you’ve accomplished what you need to in your run( ) method, you can give a hint to the thread scheduling mechanism that you’ve done enough and that some other thread might as well have the CPU. This hint (and it is a hint—there’s no guarantee your implementation will listen to it) takes the form of the yield( ) method.

We can modify the preceding example by yielding after each loop:

//: c13:YieldingThread.java
// Suggesting when to switch threads with yield().
import com.bruceeckel.simpletest.*;

public class YieldingThread extends Thread {
  private static Test monitor = new Test();
  private int countDown = 5;
  private static int threadCount = 0;
  public YieldingThread() {
    super("" + ++threadCount);
    start();
  }
  public String toString() {
    return "#" + getName() + ": " + countDown;
  }
  public void run() {
    while(true) {
      System.out.println(this);
      if(--countDown == 0) return;
      yield();
    }
  }
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    for(int i = 0; i < 5; i++)
      new YieldingThread();
    monitor.expect(new String[] {
      "#1: 5",
      "#2: 5",
      "#4: 5",
      "#5: 5",
      "#3: 5",
      "#1: 4",
      "#2: 4",
      "#4: 4",
      "#5: 4",
      "#3: 4",
      "#1: 3",
      "#2: 3",
      "#4: 3",
      "#5: 3",
      "#3: 3",
      "#1: 2",
      "#2: 2",
      "#4: 2",
      "#5: 2",
      "#3: 2",
      "#1: 1",
      "#2: 1",
      "#4: 1",
      "#5: 1",
      "#3: 1"
    }, Test.IGNORE_ORDER + Test.WAIT);
  }
} ///:~


By using yield( ), the output is evened up quite a bit. But note that if the output string is longer, you will see output that is roughly the same as it was in SimpleThread.java (try it—change toString( ) to put out longer and longer strings to see what happens). Since the scheduling mechanism is preemptive, it decides to interrupt a thread and switch to another whenever it wants, so if I/O (which is executed via the main( ) thread) takes too long, it is interrupted before run( ) has a chance to yield( ). In general, yield( ) is useful only in rare situations, and you can’t rely on it to do any serious tuning of your application.
Thinking in Java
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   Reproduced courtesy of Bruce Eckel, MindView, Inc. Design by Interspire