Can someone please tell me whether its more efficient to synchronize on a method or a block in Java?
Just thinking about this, when you synchronize on something it affects the performance so I would assume that synchronizing on a block is preferential to synchronizing on a method as it takes up less code - is this always the case?
If you synchronize the method, then the whole method is synchronized so only one thread can execute that method at a time. If you synchronize a code block within that method then more than one thread can execute the method simultaneously, but only one thread can enter the synchronized block at a time.
From this we can conclude that synchronizing on the smallest possible code block required is the most efficient way to do it. However the practical difference between synchronizing a method vs. a code block really depends on the method and what code is being left out of the synchronized block.
