| Synchronization can lead to another possible problem: deadlock . Deadlock occurs when two threads need exclusive access to the same set of resources and each thread holds the lock on a different subset of those resources. If neither thread is willing to give up the resources it has, both threads come to an indefinite halt. This isn't quite a hang in the classical sense because the program is still active and behaving normally from the perspective of the OS, but to a user the difference is insignificant. To return to the library example, deadlock is what occurs when Jack and Jill are each writing a term paper on Thomas Jefferson and they both need the two books Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy and Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory and Civic Culture . If Jill has checked out the first book and Jack has checked out the second, and neither is willing to give up the book they have, neither can finish the paper. Eventually the deadline expires and they both get an F. That's the problem of deadlock. Worse yet, deadlock can be a sporadic, hard-to-detect bug. Deadlock usually depends on unpredictable issues of timing. Most of the time, either Jack or Jill will get to the library first and get both books. In this case, the one who gets the books writes a paper and returns the books; then the other one gets the books and writes their paper. Only rarely will they arrive at the same time and each get one of the two books. 99 times out of 100 or 999 times out of 1,000, a program will run to completion perfectly normally. Only rarely will it hang for no apparent reason. Of course, if a multithreaded server is handling hundreds or thousands of connections a minute, even a problem that occurs only once every million requests can hang the server in short order. The most important technique for preventing deadlock is to avoid unnecessary synchronization. If there's an alternative approach for ensuring thread safety, such as making objects immutable or keeping a local copy of an object, use it. Synchronization should be a last resort for ensuring thread safety. If you do need to synchronize, keep the synchronized blocks small and try not to synchronize on more than one object at a time. This can be tricky, though, because many of the methods from the Java class library that your code may invoke synchronize on objects you aren't aware of. Consequently, you may in fact be synchronizing on many more objects than you expect. The best you can do in the general case is carefully consider whether deadlock is likely to be a problem and design your code around it. If multiple objects need the same set of shared resources to operate , make sure they request them in the same order. For instance, if Class A and Class B need exclusive access to Object X and Object Y, make sure that both classes request X first and Y second. If neither requests Y unless it already possesses X, deadlock is not a problem. |
