In my web application which is running on a multi threaded servlet model, I access file resources using context.getResourceAsStream(filename). I get the stream(say an xml file),parse it and immediately close the stream. If multiple requests access this line simultaneously, will there be any problem. Will one of the requests be blocked?? For me its no big issue, cos I only do a read operation. But i still wanna know what actually happens behind the method getResourceAsStream().... Thanx, SHankar.