Do you always wait for your condition to be true using While(!condition) { } ??
Really ?? O_O
But trust me, there is always a "Better Way". Isn't it?
Threads often have to coordinate their actions. The most common coordination idiom is the guarded block. Such a block begins by polling a condition that must be true before the block can proceed.
Suppose, for example
A more efficient guard invokes
Note: Always invoke
Like many methods that suspend execution,
Why is this version of
When
Some time after the second thread has released the lock, the first thread reacquires the lock and resumes by returning from the invocation of
Note: There is a second notification method,
Let's use guarded blocks to create a Producer-Consumer application. For complete documentation follow the link.
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/concurrency/guardmeth.html
guardedJoy
is a method that must not proceed until a shared variable joy
has been set by another thread. Such a method could, in theory, simply loop until the condition is satisfied, but that loop is wasteful, since it executes continuously while waiting.public void guardedJoy() { // Simple loop guard. Wastes // processor time. Don't do this! while(!joy) {} System.out.println("Joy has been achieved!"); }
Object.wait
to suspend the current thread. The invocation of wait
does not return until another thread has issued a notification that some special event may have occurred — though not necessarily the event this thread is waiting for:public synchronized void guardedJoy() { // This guard only loops once for each special event, which may not // be the event we're waiting for. while(!joy) { try { wait(); } catch (InterruptedException e) {} } System.out.println("Joy and efficiency have been achieved!"); }
Note: Always invoke
wait
inside a loop that tests for the condition being waited for. Don't assume that the interrupt was for the particular condition you were waiting for, or that the condition is still true.wait
can throw InterruptedException
. In this example, we can just ignore that exception — we only care about the value of joy
.Why is this version of
guardedJoy
synchronized? Suppose d
is the object we're using to invoke wait
. When a thread invokes d.wait
, it must own the intrinsic lock for d
— otherwise an error is thrown. Invoking wait
inside a synchronized method is a simple way to acquire the intrinsic lock.When
wait
is invoked, the thread releases the lock and suspends execution. At some future time, another thread will acquire the same lock and invoke Object.notifyAll
, informing all threads waiting on that lock that something important has happened:public synchronized notifyJoy() { joy = true; notifyAll(); }
wait
.Note: There is a second notification method,
notify
, which wakes up a single thread. Because notify
doesn't allow you to specify the thread that is woken up, it is useful only in massively parallel applications — that is, programs with a large number of threads, all doing similar chores. In such an application, you don't care which thread gets woken up.http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/concurrency/guardmeth.html