Java multithreading in CPU load

Instead of peeking into a regular queue data structure, use the java.util.concurrent package's LinkedBlockingQueue.

What you can do is, run an pool of threads (you could use executer service's fixed thread pool, i.e., a number of workers of your choice) and do LinkedBlockingQueue.take().

If a message arrives at the queue, it is fed to one of the waiting threads (yeah, take does block the thread until there is something to be fed with).

Java API Reference for Linked Blocking Queue's take method

HTH.

One old school approach to throttling rate of work, that does not use a health check thread at all (and so by-passes these problems) is to block or reject requests to add to the queue if the queue is longer than say 100. This applies dynamic back pressure on to the clients generating the load, slowing them down when the worker threads are over loaded.

This approach was added to the Java 1.5 library, see java.util.concurrent.ArrayBlockingQueue. Its put(o) method blocks if the queue is full.

Are u using Executor framework (from Java's concurrency package)? If not give it a shot. You could try using ScheduledExecutorService for the verification thread.