Should I use Thread Pool instead pool in my situation?

Question

I have simple Tower Defence game. Every monster moves in it's own thread so when new wave comes about 20 new threads are done (from 10 to 25, randomly). I remember something like executor class which is useful in situations when there are many-short lived threads. Like I have. So my questions are:

1. Should I use thread pool and how much would it increase perofrmance?
2. How should I implement it? Should pool be a field?

Answer 1

I would have a move() method for each monster and call it periodically. This way you have just one thread and it should perform just fine. BTW That one thread can use an ExecutorService if you like.

Answer 2

I think it is safe to assume that the interval between waves is more than one second, isn't it? Otherwise, your game would be quite hard to beat. ;-)

I would not expect that using a thread pool will make a difference if you spawn so few threads (15-25 threads are not a big deal). Personally, I would just use new Thread . You can always switch to an ExecutorService later, but I don't think it is needed in your scenario.

A thread pool is reasonable when you are writing, for example, a web server that has to process several hundred of incoming requests (assuming that each request should be handled in a separate thread). Then a thread pool will likely increase performance but its most important advantage is that it is a handy way to limit resource usage.

Why? If you would just spawn a new thread on each request, you risk that you will soon run out of resources if there are many requests at the same time. Using a thread pool with an upper limit of threads prevents that from happening.

(However, without knowing the details of your application, from a pure design perspective, avoiding threads completely and keeping all the game logic in one thread is definitely something that you should consider. It will make things much simpler. But again, I don't have the details.)