Fail Fast And Fail Safe Iterators In Java : What Is The Difference?

Java Collections support two types of iterators, first one is fail fast and the second is fail safe. These play a vital role when it comes to exception handling in Java. In this article on ‘Fail Fast And Fail Safe Iterators’, we will be analysing the working of the two iterators as well as the essential difference between them.

Following are the pointers to be discussed in this article:

• Concurrent Modifications
• Fail Fast Iterator
• Fail Safe Iterator
• Fail Fast vs fail Safe Iterator

Before getting into a detailed explanation, lets familiarize ourselves with the concept of Concurrent Modification.

Concurrent Modification

When a single thread (or multiple threads), iterates over a collection, it can change the structure of the collection, either by adding or deleting the element in the collection, or by updating the value of the element at a particular position. This process is known as concurrent modification.

Let us quickly take a look at the two System that concern above topic, before getting into the details of the same,

Fail Fast Sysetm:

 A system is labelled a fail fast system, if it shuts down immediately after the occurrence of an error. The operations are instantly aborted and the failures or the errors are exposed.

Fail Safe System:

A system is labelled a fail safe system, if they continue to operate even after a fault or an error has occurred. They don’t abort an operation and hide the errors instead of exposing them.

Iterators in java allow us to traverse over the Collection objects. The iterators returned by the Collection are either fail fast or fail safe in nature.

Fail Fast Iterator

Fail fast iterators in Java disallow any type of structural modification to a collection while iterating over it. Structural Modification includes adding, removing or updating any element in the collection while iterating over it. The iterator throws a ConcurrentModificationException, if a collection is structurally modified during the process of iteration.

However, it must be noted that if an item is removed using the iterators own method i.e. the remove() method, no exception is thrown. It is an entirely safe process. make Sure you have java installed on your system

Example of Fail Fast Iterator:

import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Iterator;
import java.util.Map;

public class FailFastExample {

public static void main(String[] args) {
Map monthIndex = new HashMap();
monthIndex.put("1", "January");
monthIndex.put("2", "February");
monthIndex.put("3","March");

Iterator iterator = monthIndex.keySet().iterator();

while (iterator.hasNext()) {
System.out.println(monthIndex.get(iterator.next()));
//adding an element to Map
//exception will be thrown on next call
//of next() method.
monthIndex.put("4", "April");
}
}
}

Output:

Exception in thread “main” java.util.ConcurrentModificationException

at java.util.HashMap$HashIterator.nextEntry(Unknown Source) 

Now let us go ahead and take a look at Fail Safe Iterator,

Fail Safe Iterator

Unlike Fail Fast iterators, Fail Safe iterators don’t throw any exceptions if the collection is modified during the process of iteration. This is due to the fact that they iterate on the clone of the collection, instead of the actual collection. The structural modifications done on the actual collection goes unnoticed by them.

However, it should be noticed that there is no such thing as a truly Fail Safe Iterator. It would be appropriate to term it as Weakly-Consistent. This simply means that if a Collection is modified during the process of iteration, what the Iterator sees is weakly guaranteed. This behavior differs for different collections and is documented in Javadocs.

Example of Fail Safe Iterator:

 
public class FailSafeExample {
        
	public static void main(String[] args) {
	    ConcurrentMap monthIndex = new ConcurrentHashMap();
	    monthIndex.put("1", "January");
	    monthIndex.put("2", "February");
	    monthIndex.put("3","March");
	    
	    Iterator iterator = monthIndex.keySet().iterator();
	    
	    while (iterator.hasNext()) {
	        System.out.println(monthIndex.get(iterator.next()));
	        monthIndex.put("4", "April");
	    }       
	}    
}

Output:

• January
• February
• March

Finally in this article we would be comparing these iterators,

Differences: Fail Fast And Fail Safe Iterator

Given below are the essential differences between the two iterators:

These iterators both unique and much needed in the versatile language of java. Although fail safe has a comforting ring to it, the fail fast iterator proves to be robust.

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