What does 'synchronized' mean?

Question

Vector methods are synchronized. What does it mean programmatically and logically?

Answer 1

To my understanding synchronized basically means that the compiler write a monitor.enter and monitor.exit around your method. As such it may be thread safe depending on how it is used (what I mean is you can write an object with synchronized methods that isn't threadsafe depending on what your class does).

Answer 2

The synchronized keyword is all about different threads reading and writing to the same variables, objects and resources. This is not a trivial topic in Java, but here is a quote from Sun:

Synchronized methods enable a simple strategy for preventing thread interference and memory consistency errors: if an object is visible to more than one thread, all reads or writes to that object's variables are done through synchronized methods.

In a very, very small nutshell: When you have two threads that are reading and writing to the same 'resource', say a variable named foo, you need to ensure that these threads access the variable in an atomic way. Without the synchronized keyword, your thread 1 may not see the change thread 2 made to foo, or worse, it may only be half changed. This would not be what you logically expect.

Again, this is a non-trivial topic in Java. To learn more, explore topics here on SO and the Interwebs about:

• Concurrency
• Java Memory Model

Keep exploring these topics until the name "Brian Goetz" becomes permanently associated with the term "concurrency" in your brain.

Answer 3

The synchronized keyword causes a thread to obtain a lock when entering the method, so that only one thread can execute the method at the same time (for the given object instance, unless it is a static method).

This is frequently called making the class thread-safe, but I would say this is a euphemism. While it is true that synchronization protects the internal state of the Vector from getting corrupted, this does not usually help the user of Vector much.

Consider this:

 if (vector.isEmpty()){
     vector.add(data);
 }

Even though the methods involved are synchronized, because they are being locked and unlocked individually, two unfortunately timed threads can create a vector with two elements.

So in effect, you have to synchronize in your application code as well.

Because method-level synchronization is a) expensive when you don't need it and b) insufficient when you need synchronization, there are now un-synchronized replacements (ArrayList in the case of Vector).

More recently, the concurrency package has been released, with a number of clever utilities that take care of multi-threading issues.

Answer 4

Think of it as a kind of turnstile like you might find at a football ground. There are parallel steams of people wanting to get in but at the turnstile they are 'synchronised'. Only one person at a time can get through. All those wanting to get through will do, but they may have to wait until they can go through.