Locking a ConcurrenthashMap for exclusive access.
A friend recently pointed me to an acticle on ConcurrentHashMap which indicated to him that you can't lock a ConcurrentHashMap for exclusive access. This came as a surprise to me as I have been doing just that for years. Hashtable and Collections.synchronizedMap achieve thread safety by synchronizing every method. This means that when one thread is executing one of the Map methods, other threads cannot until the first thread is finished, regardless of what they want to do with the Map. In most cases, ConcurrentHashMap is a drop-in replacement for Hashtable or Collections.synchronizedMap(new HashMap()). However, there is one significant difference -- synchronizing on a ConcurrentHashMap instance does not lock the map for exclusive use. In fact, there is no way to lock a ConcurrentHashMap for exclusive use -- it is designed to be accessed concurrently. https://www6.software.ibm.com/developerworks/education/j-concur/j-concur-a4.pdf This appears confused to me. On the one hand it state