当您希望某些状态不应该在不同线程之间共享，但每个线程在其整个生命周期内都可以访问时，ThreadLocal非常有用。

As an example, imagine a web application, where each request is served by a different thread. Imagine that for each request you need a piece of data multiple times, which is quite expensive to compute. However, that data might have changed for each incoming request, which means that you can't use a plain cache. A simple, quick solution to this problem would be to have a ThreadLocal variable holding access to this data, so that you have to calculate it only once for each request. Of course, this problem can also be solved without the use of ThreadLocal, but I devised it for illustration purposes.

也就是说，请记住ThreadLocals本质上是一种全局状态的形式。因此，它有许多其他含义，只有在考虑了所有其他可能的解决方案后才应该使用。

由于ThreadLocal是对给定线程中的数据的引用，因此在使用线程池的应用服务器中使用ThreadLocal时，可能会导致类加载泄漏。在使用ThreadLocal的remove()方法清理你get()或set()的任何ThreadLocals时，你需要非常小心。

如果你在完成时不清理，它持有的任何类的引用作为部署的webapp的一部分将保留在永久堆中，永远不会被垃圾收集。重新部署/取消部署webapp不会清除每个线程对你的webapp类的引用，因为线程不是你的webapp所拥有的。每次后续部署都将创建该类的新实例，该实例永远不会被垃圾收集。

由于java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen空间，你最终会出现内存不足的异常，在谷歌搜索之后可能只是增加-XX:MaxPermSize，而不是修复这个错误。

如果您最终遇到了这些问题，您可以通过使用Eclipse的Memory Analyzer和/或遵循Frank Kieviet的指南和后续内容来确定哪个线程和类保留了这些引用。

更新:重新发现Alex Vasseur的博客条目，它帮助我找到了一些我遇到的ThreadLocal问题。

您必须非常小心地使用ThreadLocal模式。有一些主要的缺点，如Phil所提到的，但其中一个没有提到的是，要确保设置ThreadLocal上下文的代码不是“可重入的”。

当设置信息的代码第二次或第三次运行时，可能会发生糟糕的事情，因为线程上的信息可能会在您没有预料到的时候开始发生变化。因此，在再次设置ThreadLocal信息之前，请注意确保没有设置它。

一种可能的(也是常见的)用途是，当您有一些不是线程安全的对象，但您希望避免同步访问该对象(我正在看您，SimpleDateFormat)。相反，给每个线程它自己的对象实例。

例如:

public class Foo
{
    // SimpleDateFormat is not thread-safe, so give one to each thread
    private static final ThreadLocal<SimpleDateFormat> formatter = new ThreadLocal<SimpleDateFormat>(){
        @Override
        protected SimpleDateFormat initialValue()
        {
            return new SimpleDateFormat("yyyyMMdd HHmm");
        }
    };

    public String formatIt(Date date)
    {
        return formatter.get().format(date);
    }
}

文档。

试试这个小例子，感受一下ThreadLocal变量:

public class Book implements Runnable {
    private static final ThreadLocal<List<String>> WORDS = ThreadLocal.withInitial(ArrayList::new);

    private final String bookName; // It is also the thread's name
    private final List<String> words;


    public Book(String bookName, List<String> words) {
        this.bookName = bookName;
        this.words = Collections.unmodifiableList(words);
    }

    public void run() {
        WORDS.get().addAll(words);
        System.out.printf("Result %s: '%s'.%n", bookName, String.join(", ", WORDS.get()));
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Thread t1 = new Thread(new Book("BookA", Arrays.asList("wordA1", "wordA2", "wordA3")));
        Thread t2 = new Thread(new Book("BookB", Arrays.asList("wordB1", "wordB2")));
        t1.start();
        t2.start();
    }
}

控制台输出，如果线程BookA先执行: 结果BookA: 'wordA1, wordA2, wordA3'。 结果BookB: 'wordB1, wordB2'。 控制台输出，如果先执行线程BookB: 结果BookB: 'wordB1, wordB2'。 结果BookA: 'wordA1, wordA2, wordA3'。

ThreadLocal in Java had been introduced on JDK 1.2 but was later generified in JDK 1.5 to introduce type safety on ThreadLocal variable. ThreadLocal can be associated with Thread scope, all the code which is executed by Thread has access to ThreadLocal variables but two thread can not see each others ThreadLocal variable. Each thread holds an exclusive copy of ThreadLocal variable which becomes eligible to Garbage collection after thread finished or died, normally or due to any Exception, Given those ThreadLocal variable doesn't have any other live references. ThreadLocal variables in Java are generally private static fields in Classes and maintain its state inside Thread.

阅读更多:Java示例程序和教程中的ThreadLocal