[CONFIGURATION-542] Rework sychronization of configurations

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 2.0
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Oliver Heger
• Created: 30/Apr/13 20:15
• Updated: 24/Mar/16 20:20
• Resolved: 03/Jun/13 20:41

Description

In the original approach configuration objects were not thread-safe. In later versions, more and more synchronization was added to support concurrent access to configuration properties, even when reloads occurred.

Unfortunately, the current implementation is not very clean and has a lot of problems. There a several bug reports related to this topic. Therefore, version 2.0 which will break backwards compatibility is a good opportunity to introduce a new concept for synchronization.

Of course, the new approach should be easier, cleaner, and customizable. I would also like to have an option to avoid synchronization completely if this is not required for a specific use case. Maybe a similar pattern as used by the Java collections framework can be applied: per default, configurations are not thread-safe, but there is an option to add synchronization so that they can be accessed concurrently.

Issue Links

• is related to: CONFIGURATION-530 AbstractFileConfiguration.getProperty(String key) locking causes thread halt
• is related to: CONFIGURATION-496 Excessive Synchronization AbstractFileConfiguration
• is related to: CONFIGURATION-330 Thread safety for file based configurations