I get asked a lot about how the volatile keyword interacts with arrays, so it is probably worth a blog post on the subject. Those of you who have read my posts on volatile ( Volatile Fields and Synchronization , Volatile Does Not Mean Atomic and, most importantly, What Volatile Means in Java ) will have a pretty good idea of what volatile means, but it is probably worth it to provide a reminder. Basically, if you write to a volatile field, and then you have a later read that sees that write, then the actions that happened before that write are guaranteed to be ordered before and visible to the actions that happen after the read. In practice, what this means is that the compiler and the processor can't do any sneaky reordering to move actions that come before the write to after it, or actions that come after the write to before it. See my post on What Volatile Means in Java for more detail. With that out of the way, let's go through some examples of what you can do with vol
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