唤醒线程而不冒被阻塞的风险

Question

I have a worker thread running indefinitely, which goes to sleep for one minute if there's nothing to do. Sometimes, another piece of code produces some work and wants to wake the worker thread immediately.

So I did something like this (code for illustration only):

class Worker {
    public void run() {
        while (!shuttingDown()) {
           step();
        }
    }

    private synchronized void step() {
        if (hasWork()) {
            doIt();
        } else {
            wait(60_000);
        }
    }

    public synchronized wakeMeUpInside() {
        notify();
    }
}

What I dislike is having to enter the monitor only for waking something up, which means that the notifying thread may be delayed for no good reason. As the choices of native synchronization are limited, I thought I'd switch to Condition , but it has exactly the same problem :

An implementation may (and typically does) require that the current thread hold the lock associated with this Condition when this method is called.

Answer 1

Here's a semaphore based solution:

class Worker {
    // If 0 there's no work available
    private workAvailableSem = new Semaphore(0);

    public void run() {
        while (!shuttingDown()) {
           step();
        }
    }

    private synchronized void step() {
        // Try to obtain a permit waiting up to 60 seconds to get one
        boolean hasWork = workAvailableSem.tryAquire(1, TimeUnit.MINUTES);
        if (hasWork) {
            doIt();
        }
    }

    public wakeMeUpInside() {
        workAvailableSem.release(1);
    }
}

I'm not 100% sure this meets your needs. A few things to note:

• This will add one permit each time wakeMeUpInside is called. Thus if two threads wake up the Worker it will run doIt twice without blocking. You can extend the example to avoid that.
• This waits 60 seconds for work to do. If none is available it'll end up back in the run method which will send it immediately back to the step method which will just wait again. I did this because I'm assuming you had some reason why you wanted to run every 60 seconds even if there's no work. If that's not the case just call aquire and you'll wait indefinitely for work.

As per comments below the OP wants to run only once. While you could call drainPermits in that case a cleaner solution is just to use a LockSupport like so:

class Worker {
    // We need a reference to the thread to wake it
    private Thread workerThread = null;
    // Is there work available
    AtomicBoolean workAvailable = new AtomicBoolean(false);

    public void run() {
        workerThread = Thread.currentThread();
        while (!shuttingDown()) {
           step();
        }
    }

    private synchronized void step() {
        // Wait until work is available or 60 seconds have passed
        ThreadSupport.parkNanos(TimeUnit.MINUTES.toNanos(1));
        if (workAvailable.getAndSet(false)) {
            doIt();
        }
    }

    public wakeMeUpInside() {
        // NOTE: potential race here depending on desired semantics.
        // For example, if doIt() will do all work we don't want to
        // set workAvailable to true if the doIt loop is running.
        // There are ways to work around this but the desired
        // semantics need to be specified. 
        workAvailable.set(true);
        ThreadSupport.unpark(workerThread);
    }
}