Christian Woerz

Java 21: The Revolution of Virtual Threads - A Deep Dive

What if your simple, blocking code could handle millions of requests? See how virtual threads deliver massive scalability without the complexity of reactive programming.

Java 21: The Revolution of Virtual Threads - A Deep Dive
#1about 6 minutes

Building a traditional blocking web application

A live coding demonstration shows how to build a standard blocking API with Spring Boot and how its performance degrades under load.

#2about 5 minutes

Understanding the limitations of platform threads

Creating thousands of traditional platform threads demonstrates their high memory consumption, 1:1 mapping to OS threads, and eventual OutOfMemoryError.

#3about 12 minutes

Improving performance with a reactive approach

Refactoring the blocking API to use asynchronous programming with CompletableFuture solves the performance bottleneck but introduces significant code complexity.

#4about 7 minutes

How virtual threads solve the concurrency problem

Virtual threads are lightweight, JVM-managed threads that run on a small pool of carrier threads, enabling millions of concurrent tasks without high memory overhead.

#5about 4 minutes

Enabling virtual threads in a Spring Boot application

A single configuration flag in Spring Boot 3.2 is all that's needed to switch the application to use virtual threads for handling requests.

#6about 8 minutes

Managing parallel tasks with structured concurrency

StructuredTaskScope provides a modern API to run multiple blocking operations concurrently in separate virtual threads, simplifying parallel code.

#7about 4 minutes

Understanding the limitations of virtual threads

Virtual threads can be "pinned" to their carrier thread by synchronized blocks, native calls, or CPU-intensive tasks, which negates their benefits.

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