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ThreadPoolExecutor with corePoolSize 0 should not execute tasks until task queue is full

I was going through Java Concurrency In Practice and got stuck at the 8.3.1 Thread creation and teardown topic. The following footnote warns about keeping corePoolSize to zero.

Developers are sometimes tempted to set the core size to zero so that the worker threads will eventually be torn down and therefore won’t prevent the JVM from exiting, but this can cause some strange-seeming behavior in thread pools that don’t use a SynchronousQueue for their work queue (as newCachedThreadPool does). If the pool is already at the core size, ThreadPoolExecutor creates a new thread only if the work queue is full. So tasks submitted to a thread pool with a work queue that has any capacity and a core size of zero will not execute until the queue fills up, which is usually not what is desired.

So to verify this I wrote this program which does not work as stated above.

    final int corePoolSize = 0;
    ThreadPoolExecutor tp = new ThreadPoolExecutor(corePoolSize, 1, 5, TimeUnit.SECONDS,
            new LinkedBlockingQueue<>());

    // If the pool is already at the core size
    if (tp.getPoolSize() == corePoolSize) {
        ExecutorService ex = tp;

        // So tasks submitted to a thread pool with a work queue that has any capacity
        // and a core size of zero will not execute until the queue fills up.
        // So, this should not execute until queue fills up.
        ex.execute(() -> System.out.println("Hello"));
    }

Output: Hello

So, does the behavior of the program suggest that ThreadPoolExecutor creates at least one thread if a task is submitted irrespective of corePoolSize=0. If yes, then what is the warning about in the text book.

EDIT: Tested the code in jdk1.5.0_22 upon @S.K.'s suggestion with following change:

ThreadPoolExecutor tp = new ThreadPoolExecutor(corePoolSize, 1, 5, TimeUnit.SECONDS,
                new LinkedBlockingQueue<Runnable>(1));//Queue size is set to 1.

But with this change, the program terminates without printing any output.

So am I misinterpreting these statements from the book?

EDIT (@sjlee): It's hard to add code in the comment, so I'll add it as an edit here... Can you try out this modification and run it against both the latest JDK and JDK 1.5?

final int corePoolSize = 0;
ThreadPoolExecutor tp = new ThreadPoolExecutor(corePoolSize, 1, 5, TimeUnit.SECONDS, new LinkedBlockingQueue<>());

// If the pool is already at the core size
if (tp.getPoolSize() == corePoolSize) {
    ExecutorService ex = tp;

    // So tasks submitted to a thread pool with a work queue that has any capacity
    // and a core size of zero will not execute until the queue fills up.
    // So, this should not execute until queue fills up.
    ex.execute(() -> System.out.println("Hello"));
}
tp.shutdown();
if (tp.awaitTermination(1, TimeUnit.SECONDS)) {
    System.out.println("thread pool shut down. exiting.");
} else {
    System.out.println("shutdown timed out. exiting.");
}

@sjlee Have posted the result in comments.

Solution

  • This odd behavior of ThreadPoolExecutor in Java 5 when the core pool size is zero was apparently recognized as a bug and quietly fixed in Java 6.

    Indeed, the problem reappeared in Java 7 as a result of some code reworking between 6 and 7. It was then reported as a bug, acknowledged as a bug and fixed.

    Either way, you should not be using a version of Java that is affected by this bug. Java 5 was end-of-life in 2015, and the latest available versions of Java 6 and later are not affected. That section of "Java Concurrency In Practice" is no longer apropos.

    References: