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!!

不，你不应该总是这样。但是，当一个特定对象上有多个关注点时，我倾向于避免它，而这些关注点只需要对它们本身是线程安全的。例如，你可能有一个可变数据对象，它有“label”和“parent”字段;它们需要是线程安全的，但是改变其中一个不需要阻止另一个被写入/读取。(在实践中，我将通过声明字段为volatile和/或使用java.util来避免这种情况。concurrent的AtomicFoo包装器)。

一般来说，同步有点笨拙，因为它只是一个大的锁定，而不是仔细考虑如何允许线程相互工作。使用synchronized(this)更加笨拙和反社会，因为它表示“当我持有锁时，没有人可以更改这个类的任何内容”。你需要多久做一次?

I would much rather have more granular locks; even if you do want to stop everything from changing (perhaps you're serialising the object), you can just acquire all of the locks to achieve the same thing, plus it's more explicit that way. When you use synchronized(this), it's not clear exactly why you're synchronizing, or what the side effects might be. If you use synchronized(labelMonitor), or even better labelLock.getWriteLock().lock(), it's clear what you are doing and what the effects of your critical section are limited to.

如果可能的话，让你的数据不可变(最终变量) 如果你不能避免跨多个线程共享数据的突变，使用高级编程结构[例如，粒度锁API]

Lock提供对共享资源的独占访问:一次只有一个线程可以获得锁，并且对共享资源的所有访问都要求首先获得锁。

使用ReentrantLock实现Lock接口的示例代码

 class X {
   private final ReentrantLock lock = new ReentrantLock();
   // ...

   public void m() {
     lock.lock();  // block until condition holds
     try {
       // ... method body
     } finally {
       lock.unlock()
     }
   }
 }

锁定相对于同步的优势

The use of synchronized methods or statements forces all lock acquisition and release to occur in a block-structured way. Lock implementations provide additional functionality over the use of synchronized methods and statements by providing A non-blocking attempt to acquire a lock (tryLock()) An attempt to acquire the lock that can be interrupted (lockInterruptibly()) An attempt to acquire the lock that can timeout (tryLock(long, TimeUnit)). A Lock class can also provide behavior and semantics that is quite different from that of the implicit monitor lock, such as guaranteed ordering non-re entrant usage Deadlock detection

看看这个关于各种锁的SE问题:

同步vs锁定

您可以通过使用高级并发API而不是synchronized块来实现线程安全。该文档页提供了实现线程安全的良好编程结构。

锁对象支持简化许多并发应用程序的锁定习惯用法。

executor为启动和管理线程定义了高级API。concurrent提供的执行器实现提供了适合大型应用程序的线程池管理。

并发集合使管理大型数据集合变得更容易，并且可以大大减少同步的需要。

原子变量具有最小化同步和帮助避免内存一致性错误的特性。

ThreadLocalRandom(在JDK 7中)提供了从多个线程有效生成伪随机数的功能。

其他编程结构也可以参考java.util.concurrent和java.util.concurrent.atomic包。

如果你已经决定:

你要做的就是锁定目标 当前对象;而且 你想要 锁定粒度小于 整体方法;

那么我就不认为synchronizezd是一个禁忌。

Some people deliberately use synchronized(this) (instead of marking the method synchronized) inside the whole contents of a method because they think it's "clearer to the reader" which object is actually being synchronized on. So long as people are making an informed choice (e.g. understand that by doing so they're actually inserting extra bytecodes into the method and this could have a knock-on effect on potential optimisations), I don't particularly see a problem with this. You should always document the concurrent behaviour of your program, so I don't see the "'synchronized' publishes the behaviour" argument as being so compelling.

至于应该使用哪个对象的锁的问题，我认为在当前对象上同步并没有什么错，如果这是你所做的逻辑所期望的，以及你的类通常是如何被使用的。例如，对于集合，逻辑上期望锁定的对象通常是集合本身。

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

我认为第一点(其他人使用您的锁)和第二点(所有方法不必要地使用相同的锁)可能发生在任何相当大的应用程序中。特别是当开发人员之间没有良好的沟通时。

这不是一成不变的，这主要是一个良好的实践和防止错误的问题。