concurrent read-only access vs syncronized

I have a certain object that contains two public HashMaps. According to documentation the HashMaps are not syncronized by default, although its possible to have it syncronized using some methods on the Collection interface.

These HashMaps are only populated at the beginning of the process by a single thread and from here no more updates, inserts or deletes are done.

Later on several diferent threads are able to concurrently read data out of these Maps.

My question is: if the only access type is read-only am I really obligated to syncronize the Maps ?

Is there any problem if two concurrent threadsREAD from the same memory space ?

[689 byte] By [Cordeiro] at [2007-9-26 1:16:28]