Which collection shall I use (BlockingQueue or Synchronized List) ?

Question

I need to use a thread safe queue in my app that is under high contention - there are 8 producer threads (writing data to the queue) and one consumer (consumer is only one and it is fast enough). MAX size of the queue is fixed (configurable though). Producers keep adding and consumer keeps deleting from the queue. I want to know which collection/approach should be the ideal choice :
1. ArrayBlockingQueue
2. LinkedBlockingQueue
3. LinkedList with synchronization impl
4. ArrayList with synch impl
Edited by: radiatejava on Feb 27, 2009 11:52 AM

Answer 1

1. Yes, normal queue semantics are followed (ie data always removed from head and added at the end only).
2. Saying that only BlockingQueue is the option is not correct. I can also opt for normal LinkedList and ArrayList with my own sync implementation like this :
//producer side
LinkedList Queue_ = new LinkedList();
synchronized (Queue_) {
while(Queue_.size() >= 10000) {
Queue_.wait();
Queue_.addLast(msgBuffer);
Queue_.notifyAll();
And similar thing can be done on the consumer side.
3. Lastly, pls keep in mind that LinkedList or LinkedBlockingQueue impls wrap the actual objects to be addded into another Node class objects thus creating lots of extra objects that needs to be GCed as well, making the performance not as desired as we expect (extra time is spent on GC).
I want to know if there is any performance comparision available between BlockingQueues and synch List implementations.