Consumer-Producer with Threads and BlockingQueues

Question

I wrote a Class 'Producer' which is continuously parsing files from a specific folder. The parsed result will be stored in queue for the Consumer.

public class Producer extends Thread
{ 
    private BlockingQueue<MyObject> queue;
    ...
    public void run()
    {
        while (true)
        {
        //Store email attachments into directory
        ...
        //Fill the queue
        queue.put(myObject);


        sleep(5*60*1000);
        }
    }
}

My Consumer Class is continuously checking if there is something available in the queue. If so, it's performing some work on the parsed result.

public class Consumer extends Thread
{ 
    private BlockingQueue<MyObject> queue;
    ...
    public void run()
    {
        while (true)
        {
        MyObject o = queue.poll();

        // Work on MyObject 'o'
        ...
        sleep(5*60*1000);
        }
    }
}

When I run my programm, 'top' shows that the JAVA process is always on 100%. I guess it's because of the infinite loops.

Is this a good way to implement this or is there a more resource saving way for doing this?

Answer 1

Instead of

MyObject o = queue.poll();

try

MyObject o = queue.take();

The latter will block until there is something available in the queue, whereas the former will always return immediately, whether or not something is available.