# Performance and thread-safety

The JAXBContext class is thread safe, but the Marshaller, Unmarshaller, and Validator classes are not thread safe.

For example, suppose you have a multi-thread server application that processes incoming XML documents by JAXB. In this case, for the best performance you should have just one instance of JAXBContext in your whole application like this:

Singleton JAXBContext

    class MyServlet extends HttpServlet {
        static final JAXBContext context = initContext();

        private static JAXBContext initContext() {
            return JAXBContext.newInstance(Foo.class,Bar.class);
        }
    }

And each time you need to unmarshal/marshal/validate a document. Just create a new Unmarshaller/Marshaller/Validator from this context, like this:

Thread local Unmarshaller

        public void doGet( HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse ) {
            Unmarshaller u = context.createUnmarshaller();
            u.unmarshal(...);
        }

This is the simplest safe way to use the JAXB RI from multi-threaded applications.

If you really care about the performance, and/or your application is going to read a lot of small documents, then creating Unmarshaller could be relatively an expensive operation. In that case, consider pooling Unmarshaller objects. Different threads may reuse one Unmarshaller instance, as long as you don't use one instance from two threads at the same time.