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How Does Spring Boot Implement

Asynchronous Programming? This
Is How Masters Do It!
Dylan Smith · Follow
Published in Javarevisited · 7 min read · Sep 11, 2024

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My articles are open to everyone; non-member readers can read the full
article by clicking this link.

Today, let’s talk about how to implement asynchronous programming in a

Spring Boot project. First, let’s see why asynchronous programming is used
in Spring and what problems it can solve.

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Why use an asynchronous framework and what problems does

it solve?
In the daily development of Spring Boot, synchronous calls are generally
used. However, in reality, there are many scenarios that are very suitable for
asynchronous processing.

For example, when registering a new user, an email reminder will be sent.
Later, when you upgrade to a member, you will be given 1000 points and
other scenarios.

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Taking the use case of registering a new user as an example, why is

asynchronous processing necessary? There are mainly two aspects:

1. Fault tolerance and robustness: If an exception occurs when sending an

email, the user registration cannot fail because of the failure of email
sending. Because user registration is the main function and sending an
email is a secondary function. When the user cannot receive the email
but can see and log in to the system, they won’t care about the email.

2. Improving interface performance: For example, it takes 20 milliseconds

to register a user and 2000 milliseconds to send an email. If synchronous
mode is used, the total time consumption is about 2020 milliseconds, and
the user can clearly feel sluggish. But if asynchronous mode is used,
registration can be successful in just a few tens of milliseconds. This is an
instant thing.

How does Spring Boot implement asynchronous calls?

After knowing why asynchronous calls are needed, let’s see how Spring Boot
implements such code.

In fact, it is very simple. Starting from Spring 3, the @Async annotation is

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provided. We only need to mark this annotation on the method, and this
method can implement asynchronous calls.

Of course, we also need a configuration class and add the annotation

@EnableAsync to the configuration class to enable asynchronous functions.

First step: Create a configuration class and enable asynchronous function

support
Use @EnableAsync to enable asynchronous task support. The @EnableAsync

annotation can be directly placed on the Spring Boot startup class or on

other configuration classes separately. Here we choose to use a separate
configuration class SyncConfiguration .

@Configuration
@EnableAsync
public class AsyncConfiguration {
// do nothing
}

Second step: Mark the method as an asynchronous call

Add a Component class for business processing. At the same time, add the
@Async annotation, which indicates that this method is asynchronous

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processing.

@Component
public class AsyncTask {

@Async
public void sendEmail() {
long t1 = System.currentTimeMillis();
Thread.sleep(2000);
long t2 = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.out.println("Sending an email took " + (t2-t1) + " ms");
}
}

Third step: Call asynchronous methods in the Controller.

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/user")
public class AsyncController {

@Autowired
private AsyncTask asyncTask;

@RequestMapping("/register")
public void register() throws InterruptedException {
long t1 = System.currentTimeMillis();
// Simulate the time required for user registration.

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Thread.sleep(20);
// Registration is successful. Send an email.
asyncTask.sendEmail();
long t2 = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.out.println("Registering a user took " + (t2-t1) + " ms");
}
}

After accessing http://localhost:8080/user/register , view the console log.

Registering a user took 29 ms

Sending an email took 2006 ms

As can be seen from the log, the main thread does not need to wait for the
execution of the email sending method to complete before returning,
effectively reducing the response time and improving the interface
performance.

Through the above three steps, we can easily use asynchronous methods in
Spring Boot to improve our interface performance. Isn’t it very simple?

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However, if you really implement it this way in a company project, it will

definitely be rejected during code review and you may even be reprimanded.
😫

Because the above code ignores the biggest problem, which is that a custom
thread pool has not been provided for the @Async asynchronous framework.

Why should we customize a thread pool for @Async ?

When using the @Async annotation, by default, the SimpleAsyncTaskExecutor

thread pool is used. This thread pool is not a true thread pool.

Using this thread pool cannot achieve thread reuse. A new thread will be
created every time it is called. If threads are continuously created in the
system, it will eventually lead to excessive memory usage by the system and
cause an OutOfMemoryError !!!

The key code is as follows:

public void execute(Runnable task, long startTimeout) {

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Assert.notNull(task, "Runnable must not be null");

Runnable taskToUse = this.taskDecorator != null ? this.taskDecorator.decorate(task) : task;
// Determine whether rate limiting is enabled. By default, it is not enabled.
if (this.isThrottleActive() && startTimeout > 0L) {
// Perform pre-operations and implement rate limiting.
this.concurrencyThrottle.beforeAccess();
this.doExecute(new SimpleAsyncTaskExecutor.ConcurrencyThrottlingRunnable(taskToUse));
} else {
// In the case of no rate limiting, execute thread tasks.
this.doExecute(taskToUse);
}
}

protected void doExecute(Runnable task) {

// Continuously create threads.
Thread thread = this.threadFactory != null ? this.threadFactory.newThread(task) :
thread.start();
}

public Thread createThread(Runnable runnable) {

//Specify the thread name, task-1, task-2, task-3...
Thread thread = new Thread(this.getThreadGroup(), runnable, this.nextThreadName());
thread.setPriority(this.getThreadPriority());
thread.setDaemon(this.isDaemon());
return thread;
}

If you output the thread name again, it can be easily found that each time the
printed thread name is in the form of [task-1], [task-2], [task-3], [task-4], and
the serial number at the back is continuously increasing.

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For this reason, when using the @Async asynchronous framework in Spring,
we must customize a thread pool to replace the default
SimpleAsyncTaskExecutor .

Spring provides a variety of thread pools to choose from:

• SimpleAsyncTaskExecutor : Not a real thread pool. This class does not reuse
threads and creates a new thread every time it is called.

• SyncTaskExecutor : This class does not implement asynchronous calls and

is only a synchronous operation. Only applicable to scenarios where
multithreading is not needed.

• ConcurrentTaskExecutor : An adaptation class for Executor. Not

recommended. Consider using this class only when
ThreadPoolTaskExecutor does not meet the requirements.

• ThreadPoolTaskScheduler : Can use cron expressions.

• ThreadPoolTaskExecutor : Most commonly used and recommended. In

essence, it is a wrapper for java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.

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The implementation paths of SimpleAsyncTaskExecutor and

ThreadPoolTaskExecutor are as follows:

Implement a custom thread pool

Let’s directly look at the code implementation. Here, a thread pool named
asyncPoolTaskExecutor is implemented:

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@Configuration
@EnableAsync
public class SyncConfiguration {
@Bean(name = "myAsyncPoolTaskExecutor")
public ThreadPoolTaskExecutor executor() {
ThreadPoolTaskExecutor taskExecutor = new ThreadPoolTaskExecutor();
// Core thread count.
taskExecutor.setCorePoolSize(10);
// The maximum number of threads maintained in the thread pool. Only when the buffer queue
taskExecutor.setMaxPoolSize(100);
// Cache queue.
taskExecutor.setQueueCapacity(50);
// Allowed idle time. Threads other than core threads will be destroyed after the idle tim
taskExecutor.setKeepAliveSeconds(200);
// Thread name prefix for asynchronous methods.
taskExecutor.setThreadNamePrefix("async-");
/**
* When the task cache queue of the thread pool is full and the number of threads in the t
* There are usually four policies:
* ThreadPoolExecutor.AbortPolicy: Discard the task and throw RejectedExecutionException.
* ThreadPoolExecutor.DiscardPolicy: Also discard the task, but do not throw an exception.
* ThreadPoolExecutor.DiscardOldestPolicy: Discard the task at the front of the queue and
* ThreadPoolExecutor.CallerRunsPolicy: Retry adding the current task and automatically ca
*/
taskExecutor.setRejectedExecutionHandler(new ThreadPoolExecutor.CallerRunsPolicy());
taskExecutor.initialize();
return taskExecutor;
}
}

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Congratulations! After customizing the thread pool, we can boldly use the
asynchronous processing capability provided by @Async . 😊

Configure multiple thread pools

In the development of real Internet projects, for high-concurrency requests,
the general approach is to isolate high-concurrency interfaces with separate
thread pools for processing.

Suppose there are currently two high-concurrency interfaces. Generally, two

thread pools will be defined according to the interface characteristics. At this
time, when we use @Async , we need to distinguish by specifying different
thread pool names.

Specify a specific thread pool for @Async

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@Async("myAsyncPoolTaskExecutor")
public void sendEmail() {
long t1 = System.currentTimeMillis();
Thread.sleep(2000);
long t2 = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.out.println("Sending an email took " + (t2-t1) + " ms");
}

When there are multiple thread pools in the system, we can also configure a
default thread pool. For non-default asynchronous tasks, we can specify the
thread pool name through @Async("otherTaskExecutor") .

Configure the default thread pool

The configuration class can be modified to implement AsyncConfigurer and
override the getAsyncExecutor() method to specify the default thread pool:

@Configuration
@EnableAsync
@Slf4j
public class AsyncConfiguration implements AsyncConfigurer {

@Bean(name = "myAsyncPoolTaskExecutor")

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public ThreadPoolTaskExecutor executor() {

// Initialization code for thread pool configuration as above.
}

@Bean(name = "otherTaskExecutor")
public ThreadPoolTaskExecutor otherExecutor() {
// Initialization code for thread pool configuration as above.
}

/**
* Specify the default thread pool.
*/
@Override
public Executor getAsyncExecutor() {
return executor();
}

@Override
public AsyncUncaughtExceptionHandler getAsyncUncaughtExceptionHandler() {
return (ex, method, params) ->
log.error("An unknown error occurred while executing tasks in the thread pool. Exe
}
}

As follows, the sendEmail() method uses the default thread pool

myAsyncPoolTaskExecutor , and the otherTask() method uses the thread pool
otherTaskExecutor , which is very flexible.

@Async("myAsyncPoolTaskExecutor")

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public void sendEmail() {

long t1 = System.currentTimeMillis();
Thread.sleep(2000);
long t2 = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.out.println("Sending an email took " + (t2-t1) + " ms");
}

@Async("otherTaskExecutor")
public void otherTask() {
//...
}

Many times, @Async is often used in conjunction with Spring Event to

optimize the code structure, interested parties can read this article.

SpringBoot: Combine Spring Event with @Async Annotation for

Effortless Code Decoupling and…
My articles are open to everyone; non-member readers can read the
full article by clicking this link.
medium.com

The above is all the content shared this time! If the article was helpful,

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please clap 👏and follow, thank you! ╰(*°▽°*)╯

╯**

I’m Dylan, looking forward to progressing with you. ❤

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Published in Javarevisited Follow

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A humble place to learn Java and Programming better.

Written by Dylan Smith Follow

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Software Engineer for a leading global e-commerce company. Dedicated to

explaining every programming knowledge with interesting and simple examples.

Responses (10)

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Jay Simonini
Nov 13, 2024

This article is a very good explanation of what happens with the @Async annotation.

However there is an article from 2018, https://craftingjava.com/blog/prevent-oome-async/ that gives a more

succinct description of how to solve this.

Basically you are… more

9 Reply

Gowtham Periyasamy
Sep 22, 2024

Thank you .

8 Reply

Ulug'bek Ro'zimboyev
Sep 16, 2024

Thanks Dylan, I find out that I used to Async incorrectly. This article was very helpful for me

12 1 reply Reply

See all responses

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