Java™ How To Program (Early Objects), Tenth Edition

We Call Thread Method sleep Only for Demonstration Purposes

We call method sleep in method run of the Producer and Consumer classes to emphasize the fact that, in multithreaded applications, it’s unpredictable when each thread will perform its task and for how long it will perform the task when it has a processor. Normally, these thread scheduling issues are beyond the control of the Java developer. In this program, our thread’s tasks are quite simple—the Producer writes the values 1 to 10 to the buffer, and the Consumer reads 10 values from the buffer and adds each value to variable sum. Without the sleep method call, and if the Producer executes first, given today’s phenomenally fast processors, the Producer would likely complete its task ...