Threads can be created by extending Thread and overriding the public void run () method.
Thread objects can also be created by call the thread class constructor that takes a Runnable argument, the Runnable object is said to be the target of the thread.
It is legal to create many thread objects using the same Runnable object as the target.
When a thread object is created, it does not become a thread of until its start () method is invoked. When a thread object exists but hasn’t been started. It is in the new state and is not considered alive.
Once a new thread is started, it will always enter the Runnable state.
The thread scheduler ca move thread back and forth between the Runnable state and the running state.
For a typical single-processer machine, only one thread can be running at a time, although many threads may be in Runnable state.
There is no guarantee that the order in which threads were stated determines the order in which they’ll run.
There’s no guarantee threads will take turns in any fair way. It’s up to the thread scheduler, as determined by the particular virtual machine implementation. If you want a guarantee that your threads will take turns regardless of the underlying JVM. You can use the sleep () method.
This prevents one thread from hanging the running process while another thread serves. (In most cases though yield () works well enough to encourage your threads to play together nicely).
A running thread may enter a blocked / waiting state because it can’t acquire the lock for a synchronized block of code.
When the sleep or wait is over, or an objects lock become available, the thread can only reenter the Runnable state. It will go directly from waiting to running (well, for all practical purpose only).
Sleeping is used to delay execution fo a period of time, and no locks are released when a thread goes to sleep.
A sleeping thread guaranteed to sleep for at least the time specified in argument to the sleep () method (unless it is interrupted), but there is no guarantee as to when the newly awakened thread will actually return to running.
The sleep () method is static method that sleeps the currently executing thread’s state. One thread cannot tell another thread to sleep.
If not explicitly set, a thread’s priority will have the same priority as priority of the thread created it.
The yield () method may cause a running thread to blackout if there are Runnable threads of same priority.
There is no guarantee that those will happen, and there is no guarantee that the thread selected to run. A thread might yield and then immediately renter the running state.
The closest thing to guarantee is that at any given time when the thread is running it will usually not have a lower priority than a thread in the Runnable state.
If a low-priority thread running and a high-priority thread enter Runnable, the JVM will usually preempt the running low-priority thread and put the high-priority thread in.
When one thread calls join () method of another thread, the currently running thread will wait the thread it joins which has completed.
Synchronized methods prevent more than one thread from accessing an object’s critical method code simultaneously.
You can use the synchronized keyword as a method modifier, or to start a synchronized block of code.
To synchronize a block of code ( in other words, a scope smaller than the whole method) you must specify an argument that is the object whose lock you what to synchronize code.
While only one thread can be accessing synchronized code of a particular instance multiple threads can still access same objects unsynchronized code.
When a thread gets to sleep, its locks will be unavailable to other threads.
Static methods can be synchronized, using the local from java.lang.Class instance representing the class.
The wait() method lets a thread say, “there is nothing for me to do now, so out me in your out pool and notify me when something happens that I care about”. Basically a wait () call means “wait me in your pool” or “add me to your waiting pool”.
The notify () method is used to send a signal to one and only one of the threads that are waiting in that same object’s waiting pool.
The notify method can NOT specify which waiting thread to notify.
The method notifyAll () works in the same way as notify (), only it sends the signal to all of the threads waiting on the object.
All three methods wait (), notify (), notifyAll () must be called for within a synchronized context. A thread invokes wait () or notify () on a particular object, and the thread must currently hold the lock on the object.
Deadlocking is when thread execution grinds to a halt because the code is waitng for locks to be removed from objects.
Deadlocking can occur when a locked object attempts to access another locked object that is trying to access the first locked object.
Deadlocking is bad, don’t do it.
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