The Free Lunch Is Over – that is the famous headline of an article about how the evolution of hardware alone will not solve our performance problems anymore. With the rise of multicore CPUs, software developers have to put effort into their code, to see further performance gains. Even on mobile phones, as the Tegra 2 shows, we will see more and more multicore CPUs. Therefore, there is a good reason for using concurrency in your application. However, it can also be dangerous and lead to unpredictable errors.

The following is a talk I have given to co-workers about concurrency in general and how to do it in java. It focuses less on academic problems like deadlocks, but shows how painful multi-threading is with the standard library. And there are some best-practices for how to reduce the likeliness of errors.