How ConcurrentHashMap internally works

To understand that we need to understand the internal working of ConcurrentHashMap class. And the best way to start is look at the constructor arguments. Fully parametrized constructor of ConcurrentHashMap takes 3 parameters, initialCapacity, loadFactor and concurrencyLevel.

1) initialCapacity
2) loadFactor
3) concurrencyLevel

First two are fairly simple as their name implies but last one is tricky part. This denotes the number of shards. It is used to divide the ConcurrentHashMap internally into this number of partitions and equal number of threads are created to maintain thread safety maintained at shard level.

ConcurrentHashMap

The default value of “concurrencyLevel” is 16. It means 16 shards whenever we create an instance of ConcurrentHashMap using default constructor, before even adding first key-value pair. It also means the creation of instances for various inner classes like ConcurrentHashMap$Segment, ConcurrentHashMap$HashEntry[] and ReentrantLock$NonfairSync.

In most cases in normal application, a single shard is able to handle multiple threads with reasonable count of key-value pairs. And performance will be also optimal. Having multiple shards just makes the things complex internally and introduces a lot of un-necessary objects for garbage collection, and all this for no performance improvement.

The extra objects created per concurrent hashmap using default constructor are normally in ratio of 1 to 50 i.e. for 100 such instance of ConcurrentHashMap, there will be 5000 extra objects created.

Based on above, I will suggest to use the constructor parameters wisely to reduce the number of unnecessary objects and improving the performance.

A good approach can be having initialization like this:

ConcurrentHashMap instance = new ConcurrentHashMap(16, 0.9f, 1);




An initial capacity of 16 ensures a reasonably good number of elements before resizing happens. Load factor of 0.9 ensures a dense packaging inside ConcurrentHashMap which will optimize memory use. And concurrencyLevel set to 1 will ensure that only one shard is created and maintained.

Please note that if you are working on very high concurrent application with very high frequency of updates in ConcurrentHashMap, you should consider increasing the concurrencyLevel more than 1, but again it should be a well calculated number to get the best results.