Sharing a Java synchronized block across a cluster, or using a global lock?
I have some code that I want to only allow access to by one thread. I know how to accomplish this using either synchronized blocks or methods, but will this work in a clustered environment?
The target environment is WebSphere 6.0, with 2 nodes in the cluster.
I have a feeling that synchronized won't work, since each instance of the application on each node will have its own JVM, right?
What I am trying to do here is perform some updates to database records when the system is booted. It will look for any database records that are older that the version of the code, and perform specific tasks to update them. I only want one node to perform these upgrades, since I want to be sure that each work item is only upgraded once, and performance of these upgrades is not a big concern, since it only happens at application startup, and it only really does anything when the code has been changed since the last time it started up.
The database is DB2v9, and I am accessing it directly via JNDI (no ORM layer).
It has been suggested that a global lock might be the way to go here, but I'm not sure how to do that.
Does anyone have any pointers in this arena?
Thanks!
Answer
Yes, you are correct in that synchronized blocks won't work across a cluster. The reason is, as you stated, that each node has its own JVM.
There are ways, however, to get synchronized blocks to work in a cluster as they would work in a single-node environment. The easiest way is to use a product like Terracotta, which will handle the coordination of threads between different JVMs so that normal concurrency controls can be used across the cluster. There are many articles explaining how this works, like Introduction to OpenTerracotta.
There are other solutions, of course. It mostly depends on what you really want to achieve here. I wouldn't use database locks for synchronizing if you need to scale, as DB doesn't. But I really urge you to find a ready-made solution, because messing around with cluster synchronization is messy business :)