Thread Safe Issue with Servlet

Question

I saw the following statement in one of the J2EE compliant server documentations:
"By default, servlets are not thread-safe. The methods in a single servlet instance are usually executed numerous times simultaneously (up to the available memory limit)."
I'm quite concerned with this statement for the primary reason that (I'm trying to reason by reading it out loud) servlets are not going to be thread-safe especially when available memory hit really really low!! So, when the application is still having sufficient memory, we will not likely run into concurrency problems, i.e the happy scenario for a short period after server is started. BUT, good things don't last long.. Anyway, hope someone can explain to me with more insights. Thanks.

Answer 1

Don't worry, memory occupation and thread safety are not related at all.
In my opinion, the following is the meaning of the statement you quote.
Since the servlet specification doesn't force any implementation to spawn a new servlet object upon each request (and this should be a real memory hit!), nor to synchronize calls to servlet methods, you should always code your servlet in a "stateless" fashion: you should be aware the same method on the same object could (and probably will) be called concurrently if multiple concurrent client requests are submitted.
Hope I've been clear enough...