Phaser

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Overview

The Phaser class is an extension of the functionality offered by CyclicBarrier and CountDownLatch classes and is more flexible in use. One stark difference is that the Phaser class allows the number of registered parties that synchronize on a phaser to vary over time. The Phaser can be repeatedly awaited similar to a CyclicBarrier.

Example

Apart from specifying the number of threads/tasks to synchronize in the constructor, threads/tasks can also register with an instance of Phaser using the register() or the bulkRegister(int) methods. Note, that if a thread register()-s with an instance of Phaser there’s no way for the thread to query the instance to determine if it registered with the instance, i.e. there’s no internal book-keeping maintained by the Phaser instance. However, if such behavior is desired the Phaser class can be subclassed and the book-keeping functionality added.

The program below exercises some of the APIs exposed by Phaser to register threads with the barrier. Run the program and study the comments before we discuss them.