一个更容易理解的方法是，是什么使代码不是线程安全的。有两个主要问题会使线程应用程序产生不需要的行为。

Accessing shared variable without locking This variable could be modified by another thread while executing the function. You want to prevent it with a locking mechanism to be sure of the behavior of your function. General rule of thumb is to keep the lock for the shortest time possible. Deadlock caused by mutual dependency on shared variable If you have two shared variable A and B. In one function, you lock A first then later you lock B. In another function, you start locking B and after a while, you lock A. This is a potential deadlock where first function will wait for B to be unlocked when second function will wait for A to be unlocked. This issue will probably not occur in your development environment and only from time to time. To avoid it, all locks must always be in the same order.

让我们举个例子来回答这个问题:

class NonThreadSafe {

    private int count = 0;

    public boolean countTo10() {
        count = count + 1;
        return (count == 10);
    }

countTo10方法将1加到计数器上，如果计数达到10则返回true。它应该只返回true一次。

只要只有一个线程在运行代码，这就可以工作。如果两个线程同时运行代码，就会出现各种问题。

例如，如果count从9开始，一个线程可以将1加到count(得到10)，但随后第二个线程可以进入该方法，在第一个线程有机会执行与10的比较之前再次加1(得到11)。然后两个线程进行比较，发现count是11，并且都不返回true。

所以这段代码不是线程安全的。

从本质上讲，所有多线程问题都是由这类问题的某些变体引起的。

解决方案是确保加法和比较操作不能分开(例如，用某种同步代码包围这两个语句)，或者设计一个不需要两个操作的解决方案。这样的代码是线程安全的。

我想在其他好的答案之上添加一些更多的信息。

线程安全意味着多个线程可以在同一个对象中读写数据，而不会出现内存不一致错误。在高度多线程的程序中，线程安全的程序不会对共享数据造成副作用。

看看这个SE问题，了解更多细节:

线程安全是什么意思?

线程安全程序保证内存一致性。

从oracle文档页高级并发API:

内存一致性属性:

Java™语言规范的第17章定义了内存操作(如共享变量的读写)的happens-before关系。只有当写操作发生时(在读操作之前)，一个线程的写操作的结果才保证对另一个线程的读操作可见。

synchronized和volatile结构，以及Thread.start()和Thread.join()方法，可以形成happens-before关系。

concurrent中所有类的方法及其子包将这些保证扩展到更高级别的同步。特别是:

Actions in a thread prior to placing an object into any concurrent collection happen-before actions subsequent to the access or removal of that element from the collection in another thread. Actions in a thread prior to the submission of a Runnable to an Executor happen-before its execution begins. Similarly for Callables submitted to an ExecutorService. Actions taken by the asynchronous computation represented by a Future happen-before actions subsequent to the retrieval of the result via Future.get() in another thread. Actions prior to "releasing" synchronizer methods such as Lock.unlock, Semaphore.release, and CountDownLatch.countDown happen-before actions subsequent to a successful "acquiring" method such as Lock.lock, Semaphore.acquire, Condition.await, and CountDownLatch.await on the same synchronizer object in another thread. For each pair of threads that successfully exchange objects via an Exchanger, actions prior to the exchange() in each thread happen-before those subsequent to the corresponding exchange() in another thread. Actions prior to calling CyclicBarrier.await and Phaser.awaitAdvance (as well as its variants) happen-before actions performed by the barrier action, and actions performed by the barrier action happen-before actions subsequent to a successful return from the corresponding await in other threads.

完成其他回答:

只有当方法中的代码做以下两件事之一时，同步才会令人担忧:

使用一些非线程安全的外部资源。 读取或更改持久对象或类字段

这意味着在方法中定义的变量总是线程安全的。对方法的每次调用都有自己版本的这些变量。如果方法是由另一个线程调用的，或者是由同一线程调用的，甚至是方法调用自身(递归)，这些变量的值是不共享的。

线程调度不保证是循环的。一个任务可能会以牺牲相同优先级的线程为代价完全占用CPU。你可以使用Thread.yield()来获得良心。你可以使用(java) thread . setpriority (thread . norm_priority -1)来降低线程的优先级

另外还要注意:

迭代这些“线程安全”结构的应用程序的巨大运行时成本(已经被其他人提到)。 Thread.sleep(5000)应该休眠5秒。但是，如果有人更改了系统时间，您可能会睡很长时间或根本没有时间。操作系统记录唤醒时间是绝对的，而不是相对的。

与其认为代码或类是线程安全的，我认为将操作视为线程安全的更有帮助。如果两个操作在从任意线程上下文运行时按照指定的方式运行，那么它们就是线程安全的。在许多情况下，类将以线程安全的方式支持一些操作组合，而其他则不支持。

例如，许多像数组列表和散列集这样的集合可以保证，如果它们最初只由一个线程访问，并且在引用对任何其他线程可见后永远不会被修改，那么它们可以被任何线程组合以任意方式读取而不受干扰。

More interestingly, some hash-set collections such as the original non-generic one in .NET, may offer a guarantee that as long as no item is ever removed, and provided that only one thread ever writes to them, any thread that tries to read the collection will behave as though accessing a collection where updates might be delayed and occur in arbitrary order, but which will otherwise behave normally. If thread #1 adds X and then Y, and thread #2 looks for and sees Y and then X, it would be possible for thread #2 to see that Y exists but X doesn't; whether or not such behavior is "thread-safe" would depend upon whether thread #2 is prepared to deal with that possibility.

As a final note, some classes--especially blocking communications libraries--may have a "close" or "Dispose" method which is thread-safe with respect to all other methods, but no other methods that are thread-safe with respect to each other. If a thread performs a blocking read request and a user of the program clicks "cancel", there would be no way for a close request to be issued by the thread that's attempting to perform the read. The close/dispose request, however, may asynchronously set a flag which will cause the read request to be canceled as soon as possible. Once close is performed on any thread, the object would become useless, and all attempts at future actions would fail immediately, but being able to asynchronously terminate any attempted I/O operations is better than require that the close request be synchronized with the read (since if the read blocks forever, the synchronization request would be likewise blocked).

我喜欢Brian Goetz的Java并发实践中的定义，因为它的全面性

如果一个类在从多个线程访问时行为正确，那么它就是线程安全的，而不管运行时环境对这些线程的执行是如何调度或交错的，并且在调用代码方面没有额外的同步或其他协调。