How to detect deadlock ? Timeout in synchronized block?

Question

I’m debugging a Java application that runs several threads. After a while of watching the log it seems that one of those threads is not running anymore. My guess is that the

Answer 1

You can have the threads share an explicit lock (see java.util.concurrent.lock.Lock). You can then use Lock.tryLock(), which can take an optional timeout.

You can also use the jstack utility that comes with java 1.6 (not sure about 1.5) which will print out the state of all of your threads and what they may or may not be waiting for. Just call it with the process id. eg. :

  > jstack PID 

        "Signal Dispatcher" daemon prio=10 tid=0x00000000408e8400 nid=0x79a8 runnable [0x0000000000000000..0x000000004143f810]
           java.lang.Thread.State: RUNNABLE

        "Finalizer" daemon prio=10 tid=0x00000000408c9400 nid=0x79a7 in Object.wait() [0x0000000041a7b000..0x0000000041a7bb00]
           java.lang.Thread.State: WAITING (on object monitor)
            at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method)
            - waiting on <0x00007f992d1e7050> (a java.lang.ref.ReferenceQueue$Lock)
            at java.lang.ref.ReferenceQueue.remove(ReferenceQueue.java:116)
            - locked <0x00007f992d1e7050> (a java.lang.ref.ReferenceQueue$Lock)
            at java.lang.ref.ReferenceQueue.remove(ReferenceQueue.java:132)
            at java.lang.ref.Finalizer$FinalizerThread.run(Finalizer.java:159)

        "Reference Handler" daemon prio=10 tid=0x00000000408c2000 nid=0x79a6 in Object.wait() [0x000000004197a000..0x000000004197ac80]
           java.lang.Thread.State: WAITING (on object monitor)
            at java.lang.Object.wait(Native Method)
            - waiting on <0x00007f992d41a958> (a java.lang.ref.Reference$Lock)
            at java.lang.Object.wait(Object.java:485)
            at java.lang.ref.Reference$ReferenceHandler.run(Reference.java:116)
            - locked <0x00007f992d41a958> (a java.lang.ref.Reference$Lock)