Java Concurrency: The Interview Questions That Trip People Up

Java Concurrency: The Interview Questions That Trip People Up

Concurrency questions separate mid-level from senior engineers in interviews. Here are the concepts that come up most frequently.

Q1: What's the difference between synchronized and ReentrantLock?

synchronized is simpler — it's built into the language and automatically releases the lock. ReentrantLock is more flexible:

ReentrantLock lock = new ReentrantLock();

if (lock.tryLock(1, TimeUnit.SECONDS)) { // timed wait
    try {
        // critical section
    } finally {
        lock.unlock(); // must unlock manually
    }
}

Use synchronized by default. Use ReentrantLock when you need timed locking, interruptible locking, or multiple condition variables.

Q2: What does volatile actually guarantee?

volatile guarantees visibility, not atomicity. It ensures a write to a volatile variable is immediately visible to all threads. But it does NOT make compound operations atomic.

volatile int counter = 0;
counter++; // NOT atomic — this is read-modify-write

Use AtomicInteger for atomic increments. Use volatile only for a single-field flag.

Q3: Explain the happens-before relationship

The Java Memory Model defines happens-before (HB) guarantees. If action A happens-before B, then B sees all writes made by A.

Key HB relationships:

• Unlock of a monitor → lock of the same monitor
• Write to a volatile → subsequent read of the same volatile
• Thread.start() → any action in the started thread
• Any action in a thread → Thread.join() returns

Q4: What is a ConcurrentHashMap and when would you use it over HashMap?

ConcurrentHashMap allows concurrent reads and a configurable number of concurrent writes without locking the entire map. In Java 8+, it uses a segment-level lock approach.

Use it when multiple threads read and write to the map concurrently. Never use Collections.synchronizedMap(new HashMap<>()) — it serialises all operations.