Master Parallel Computing and Multithreading in Java

The mood in the meeting on the 12th floor of an international investment bank was as bleak as it gets. The developers of the firm met to discuss the best way forward after a critical core application failed and caused a system wide outage.

Guys, we have a serious issue here. I found out that the outage was caused by a race condition in our code, introduced a while ago and triggered last night. says Mark Adams, senior developer.

The room goes silent. The cars outside the floor to ceiling windows slowly and silently creep along in the heavy city traffic. The senior developers immediately understand the severity of the situation, realizing that they will now be working around the clock to fix the issue and sort out the mess in the datastore. The less experienced developers understand that a race condition is serious but don’t know exactly what causes it and therefore keep their mouths shut.

Eventually Brian Holmes, delivery manager, breaks the silence with The application has been running for months without any problems, we haven’t released any code recently, how is it possible that the software just broke down?!

Everyone shakes their heads and goes back to their desk leaving Brian in the room alone, puzzled. He takes out his phone and googles ace condition .