避免使用synchronized(this)作为锁定机制:这会锁定整个类实例，并可能导致死锁。在这种情况下，重构代码以只锁定特定的方法或变量，这样整个类就不会被锁定。同步可以在方法级别内使用。 下面的代码展示了如何锁定一个方法，而不是使用synchronized(this)。

   public void foo() {
if(operation = null) {
    synchronized(foo) { 
if (operation == null) {
 // enter your code that this method has to handle...
          }
        }
      }
    }

一个使用synchronized(this)的好例子。

// add listener
public final synchronized void addListener(IListener l) {listeners.add(l);}
// remove listener
public final synchronized void removeListener(IListener l) {listeners.remove(l);}
// routine that raise events
public void run() {
   // some code here...
   Set ls;
   synchronized(this) {
      ls = listeners.clone();
   }
   for (IListener l : ls) { l.processEvent(event); }
   // some code here...
}

正如你在这里看到的，我们在这个上使用同步来方便地与那里的一些同步方法进行长周期(可能是无限循环的run方法)合作。

当然，在私有字段上使用synchronized可以很容易地重写。但有时，当我们已经有了一些同步方法的设计时(例如，我们从遗留类派生出来的，synchronized(this)可能是唯一的解决方案)。

I think there is a good explanation on why each of these are vital techniques under your belt in a book called Java Concurrency In Practice by Brian Goetz. He makes one point very clear - you must use the same lock "EVERYWHERE" to protect the state of your object. Synchronised method and synchronising on an object often go hand in hand. E.g. Vector synchronises all its methods. If you have a handle to a vector object and are going to do "put if absent" then merely Vector synchronising its own individual methods isn't going to protect you from corruption of state. You need to synchronise using synchronised (vectorHandle). This will result in the SAME lock being acquired by every thread which has a handle to the vector and will protect overall state of the vector. This is called client side locking. We do know as a matter of fact vector does synchronised (this) / synchronises all its methods and hence synchronising on the object vectorHandle will result in proper synchronisation of vector objects state. Its foolish to believe that you are thread safe just because you are using a thread safe collection. This is precisely the reason ConcurrentHashMap explicitly introduced putIfAbsent method - to make such operations atomic.

总之

Synchronising at method level allows client side locking. If you have a private lock object - it makes client side locking impossible. This is fine if you know that your class doesn't have "put if absent" type of functionality. If you are designing a library - then synchronising on this or synchronising the method is often wiser. Because you are rarely in a position to decide how your class is going to be used. Had Vector used a private lock object - it would have been impossible to get "put if absent" right. The client code will never gain a handle to the private lock thus breaking the fundamental rule of using the EXACT SAME LOCK to protect its state. Synchronising on this or synchronised methods do have a problem as others have pointed out - someone could get a lock and never release it. All other threads would keep waiting for the lock to be released. So know what you are doing and adopt the one that's correct. Someone argued that having a private lock object gives you better granularity - e.g. if two operations are unrelated - they could be guarded by different locks resulting in better throughput. But this i think is design smell and not code smell - if two operations are completely unrelated why are they part of the SAME class? Why should a class club unrelated functionalities at all? May be a utility class? Hmmmm - some util providing string manipulation and calendar date formatting through the same instance?? ... doesn't make any sense to me at least!!

这里已经说过，同步块可以使用用户定义的变量作为锁对象，当同步函数只使用“this”时。当然，你也可以对函数中需要同步的部分进行操作。

但是每个人都说synchronized函数和block之间没有区别，block覆盖了使用“this”作为锁对象的整个函数。这是不对的，不同的是字节码，将在这两种情况下产生。在同步块使用的情况下，应该分配本地变量，其中包含引用“this”。因此，我们会得到一个更大的函数(如果你只有几个函数，这就无关紧要了)。

你可以在这里找到更详细的解释: http://www.artima.com/insidejvm/ed2/threadsynchP.html

同步块的使用也不好，原因如下:

synchronized关键字在一个方面非常有限:当退出一个同步块时，所有等待该锁的线程都必须被解除阻塞，但只有其中一个线程可以获得锁;所有其他人都看到锁已被占用，并返回阻塞状态。这不仅仅是浪费了大量的处理周期:为解除线程阻塞而进行的上下文切换通常还涉及从磁盘调出内存，这是非常非常昂贵的。

关于这方面的更多细节，我建议你阅读这篇文章: http://java.dzone.com/articles/synchronized-considered

这实际上只是对其他答案的补充，但如果你对使用私有对象进行锁定的主要反对意见是，它会使你的类与与业务逻辑无关的字段混乱，那么Project Lombok有@Synchronized在编译时生成样板:

@Synchronized
public int foo() {
    return 0;
}

编译,

private final Object $lock = new Object[0];

public int foo() {
    synchronized($lock) {
        return 0;
    }
}

不进行同步的原因是，有时您需要多个锁(经过一些额外的思考后，第二个锁通常会被删除，但您仍然需要它处于中间状态)。如果你锁定了这个，你总是要记住两个锁中哪个是这个;如果你锁定一个私有对象，变量名会告诉你。

从读者的角度来看，如果你看到了锁定，你总是必须回答两个问题:

这能保护什么样的权限? 一把锁真的够了吗，难道不是有人引入了漏洞吗?

一个例子:

class BadObject {
    private Something mStuff;
    synchronized setStuff(Something stuff) {
        mStuff = stuff;
    }
    synchronized getStuff(Something stuff) {
        return mStuff;
    }
    private MyListener myListener = new MyListener() {
        public void onMyEvent(...) {
            setStuff(...);
        }
    }
    synchronized void longOperation(MyListener l) {
        ...
        l.onMyEvent(...);
        ...
    }
}

如果两个线程在BadObject的两个不同实例上开始longOperation()，它们将获得 他们的锁;当调用l.onMyEvent(…)时，会出现死锁，因为两个线程都不能获得其他对象的锁。

在本例中，我们可以通过使用两个锁来消除死锁，一个用于短操作，一个用于长操作。