Fail Fast And Fail Safe Iterators In Java

Iterators in java give us the facility to traverse over the Collection objects. Iterators returned by the Collection are either fail-fast in nature or fail-safe in nature. Fail-Fast iterators immediately throw ConcurrentModificationException if a collection is modified while iterating over it. Where as Fail-Safe iterators don’t throw any exceptions if a collection is modified while iterating over it. Because, they operate on the clone of the collection, not on the actual collection. Let’s see Fail-Fast and Fail-Safe Iterators in detail.

Fail-Fast Iterators In Java :
Fail-Fast iterators, returned by most of the collection types, doesn’t tolerate any structural modifications to a collection while iterating over it. (Structural modifications means add, remove or updating an element in the collection) They throw ConcurrentModificationException if a collection is structurally modified while iteration is going on the collection. But, they don’t throw any exceptions if the collection is modified by the iterator’s own methods like remove().

How Fail-Fast Iterators Work?
All Collection types maintain an internal array of objects ( Object[] ) to store the elements. Fail-Fast iterators directly fetch the elements from this array. They always consider that this internal array is not modified while iterating over its elements. To know whether the collection is modified or not, they use an internal flag called modCount which is updated each time a collection is modified. Every time when an Iterator calls the next() method, it checks the modCount. If it finds the modCount has been updated after this Iterator has been created, it throws ConcurrentModificationException.

Fail-Safe Iterators In Java :
Fail-Safe iterators don’t throw any exceptions if the collection is modified while iterating over it. Because, they iterate on the clone of the collection not on the actual collection. So, any structural modifications done on the actual collection goes unnoticed by these iterators. But, these iterators have some drawbacks. One of them is that it is not always guaranteed that you will get up-to-date data while iterating. Because any modifications to collection after the iterator has been created is not updated in the iterator. One more disadvantage of these iterators is that there will be additional overhead of creating the copy of the collection in terms of both time and memory.