[rules-users] Question on data safety and threading...

I know the threading topic has been discussed quite extensively, but I still need some guidance in the following case: My application has a RuleManager object that maintains references to many RuleBase objects in a HashMap. I'm using Spring Framework to wire the bean relationships together. The RulesManager is typically busy servicing client requests for instances of WorkingMemory objects which it fetches from the individual RuleBase objects it maintains in its Hash (wm.newWorkingMemory() ). associated with the individual RuleBase object - for that, I'm going to create a new instance of the RuleBase object and then I need an efficient and safe way to 'swap' this new RuleBase object for the old object reference in the RulesManager's map. My question is: should I synchronize the getWorkingMemory(..) method inside my RulesManager object that uses the hashmap, AND also synchronize the code that does the object swap - would that be sufficient?! How would I do it using Collections.synchronizedMap() - remember that I don't have that much control over the creation of the Map since Spring controls that part of populating hashmap at startup. The critical factors for me are speed and efficiency in servicing regular client requests for WorkingMemory - ideally, I'd synchronize only the method that does the object swap, but I'm sure that may have some bad consequences... though as long as I can avoid the race condition I could probably live with it. Thanks in advance for ideas - -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Question-on-data-safety-and-threading...-tf3396050.... Sent from the drools - user mailing list archive at Nabble.com.