Avoid Deadlock example

This is a classic question. I see two possible solutions:

1. To sort accounts and synchronize at account which has an id lower than another one. This method mentioned in the bible of concurrency Java Concurrency in Practice in chapter 10. In this book authors use system hash code to distinguish the accounts. See java.lang.System#identityHashCode.
2. The second solution is mentioned by you - yes you can avoid nested synchronized blocks and your code will not lead to deadlock. But in that case the processing might have some problems because if you withdraw money from the first account the second account may be locked for any significant time and probably you will need to put money back to the first account. That's not good and because that nested synchronization and the lock of two accounts is better and more commonly used solution.

Sort the accounts. The dead lock is from the ordering of the accounts (a,b vs b,a).

So try:

 public static void transfer(Account from, Account to, double amount){
      Account first = from;
      Account second = to;
      if (first.compareTo(second) < 0) {
          // Swap them
          first = to;
          second = from;
      }
      synchronized(first){
           synchronized(second){
                from.withdraw(amount);
                to.deposit(amount);
           }
      }
 }

In addition to the solution of lock ordered you can also avoid the deadlock by synchronizing on a private static final lock object before performing any account transfers.

 class Account{
 double balance;
 int id;
 private static final Object lock = new Object();
  ....




 public static void transfer(Account from, Account to, double amount){
          synchronized(lock)
          {
                    from.withdraw(amount);
                    to.deposit(amount);
          }
     }

This solution has the problem that a private static lock restricts the system to performing transfers "sequentially".

Another one can be if each Account has a ReentrantLock:

private final Lock lock = new ReentrantLock();




public static void transfer(Account from, Account to, double amount)
{
       while(true)
        {
          if(from.lock.tryLock()){
            try { 
                if (to.lock.tryLock()){
                   try{
                       from.withdraw(amount);
                       to.deposit(amount);
                       break;
                   } 
                   finally {
                       to.lock.unlock();
                   }
                }
           }
           finally {
                from.lock.unlock();
           }

           int n = number.nextInt(1000);
           int TIME = 1000 + n; // 1 second + random delay to prevent livelock
           Thread.sleep(TIME);
        }

 }

Deadlock does not occur in this approach because those locks will never be held indefinitely. If the current object's lock is acquired but the second lock is unavailable, the first lock is released and the thread sleeps for some specified amount of time before attempting to reacquire the lock.

You can also create separate lock for each Account (in Account class) and then before doing transaction acquire both locks. Take a look:

private boolean acquireLocks(Account anotherAccount) {
        boolean fromAccountLock = false;
        boolean toAccountLock = false;
        try {
            fromAccountLock = getLock().tryLock();
            toAccountLock = anotherAccount.getLock().tryLock();
        } finally {
            if (!(fromAccountLock && toAccountLock)) {
                if (fromAccountLock) {
                    getLock().unlock();
                }
                if (toAccountLock) {
                    anotherAccount.getLock().unlock();
                }
            }
        }
        return fromAccountLock && toAccountLock;
    }

After get two locks you can do transfer without worrying about safe.

    public static void transfer(Acc from, Acc to, double amount) {
        if (from.acquireLocks(to)) {
            try {
                from.withdraw(amount);
                to.deposit(amount);
            } finally {
                from.getLock().unlock();
                to.getLock().unlock();
            }
        } else {
            System.out.println(threadName + " cant get Lock, try again!");
            // sleep here for random amount of time and try do it again
            transfer(from, to, amount);
        }
    }