notify()让您编写比notifyAll()更有效的代码。

考虑下面这段从多个并行线程执行的代码:

synchronized(this) {
    while(busy) // a loop is necessary here
        wait();
    busy = true;
}
...
synchronized(this) {
    busy = false;
    notifyAll();
}

可以通过使用notify()来提高效率:

synchronized(this) {
    if(busy)   // replaced the loop with a condition which is evaluated only once
        wait();
    busy = true;
}
...
synchronized(this) {
    busy = false;
    notify();
}

在有大量线程的情况下，或者如果等待循环条件的计算成本很高，notify()将比notifyAll()快得多。例如，如果你有1000个线程，那么999个线程将在第一个notifyAll()之后被唤醒和评估，然后是998，然后是997，依此类推。相反，使用notify()解决方案，只会唤醒一个线程。

使用notifyAll()当你需要选择哪个线程将做下一步工作:

synchronized(this) {
    while(idx != last+1)  // wait until it's my turn
        wait();
}
...
synchronized(this) {
    last = idx;
    notifyAll();
}

Finally, it's important to understand that in case of notifyAll(), the code inside synchronized blocks that have been awakened will be executed sequentially, not all at once. Let's say there are three threads waiting in the above example, and the fourth thread calls notifyAll(). All three threads will be awakened but only one will start execution and check the condition of the while loop. If the condition is true, it will call wait() again, and only then the second thread will start executing and will check its while loop condition, and so on.

等待队列和阻塞队列

您可以假设与每个锁对象关联的队列有两种类型。一个是阻塞队列，包含等待监控器锁的线程，另一个是等待队列，包含等待通知的线程。(线程调用Object.wait时将被放入等待队列)。

每次锁可用时，调度器从阻塞队列中选择一个线程执行。

当调用notify时，等待队列中只有一个线程被放入阻塞队列中争夺锁，而notifyAll将等待队列中的所有线程放入阻塞队列中。

现在你能看出区别了吗? 尽管在这两种情况下，只有一个线程被执行，但使用notifyAll，其他线程仍然得到一个要执行的更改(因为它们在阻塞队列中)，即使它们未能争用锁。

一些指导原则

我基本上建议一直使用notifyAll，尽管可能会有一点性能损失。 仅在以下情况下使用notify:

任何被唤醒的线程都可以使程序继续运行。 性能很重要。

例如: @xagyg的回答给出了一个通知会导致死锁的例子。在他的例子中，生产者和消费者都与同一个锁对象相关。因此，当生产者调用notify时，可以通知生产者或消费者。但是，如果一个生产者被唤醒，它就不能使程序继续进行，因为缓冲区已经满了。因此发生了死锁。 有两种解决方法:

使用@xagyg建议的notifyALl。 使生产者和消费者关联不同的锁对象，并且生产者只能唤醒消费者，消费者只能唤醒生产者。在这种情况下，无论唤醒哪个消费者，它都可以消费缓冲区并使程序继续进行。

notify() -从对象的等待集中随机选择一个线程，并将其置于BLOCKED状态。对象的等待集中的其余线程仍然处于WAITING状态。

notifyAll() -将所有线程从对象的等待集移动到BLOCKED状态。使用notifyAll()后，共享对象的等待集中没有剩余线程，因为所有线程现在都处于BLOCKED状态，而不是WAITING状态。

BLOCKED—锁定获取阻塞。 WAITING -等待通知(或阻塞连接完成)。

有用的差异:

Use notify() if all your waiting threads are interchangeable (the order they wake up doesn't matter), or if you only ever have one waiting thread. A common example is a thread pool used to execute jobs from a queue--when a job is added, one of threads is notified to wake up, execute the next job and go back to sleep. Use notifyAll() for other cases where the waiting threads may have different purposes and should be able to run concurrently. An example is a maintenance operation on a shared resource, where multiple threads are waiting for the operation to complete before accessing the resource.

摘自Java大师Joshua Bloch在Effective Java第二版中的文章:

“第69项:选择并发实用程序而不是等待和通知”。

我想提一下《Java并发实践》中解释的内容:

第一点，是Notify还是NotifyAll?

It will be NotifyAll, and reason is that it will save from signall hijacking.

If two threads A and B are waiting on different condition predicates of same condition queue and notify is called, then it is upto JVM to which thread JVM will notify. Now if notify was meant for thread A and JVM notified thread B, then thread B will wake up and see that this notification is not useful so it will wait again. And Thread A will never come to know about this missed signal and someone hijacked it's notification. So, calling notifyAll will resolve this issue, but again it will have performance impact as it will notify all threads and all threads will compete for same lock and it will involve context switch and hence load on CPU. But we should care about performance only if it is behaving correctly, if it's behavior itself is not correct then performance is of no use.

这个问题可以通过使用jdk 5中提供的显式锁定Lock的Condition对象来解决，因为它为每个条件谓词提供了不同的等待。在这里，它将表现正确，不会有性能问题，因为它将调用信号，并确保只有一个线程正在等待该条件