11. Thread Signaling

The purpose of thread signaling is to enable threads to send signals to each other. Additionally, thread signaling enables threads to wait for signals from other threads. For instance, a thread B might wait for a signal from thread A indicating that data is ready to be processed.

1. Signaling via Shared Objects

A simple way for threads to send signals to each other is by setting the signal values in some shared object variable. Thread A may set the boolean member variable hasDataToProcess to true from inside a synchronized block, and thread B may read the hasDataToProcess member variable, also inside a synchronized block. Here is a simple example of an object that can hold such a signal, and provide methods to set and check it:

public class MySignal{
   
  protected boolean hasDataToProcess = false;
  public synchronized boolean hasDataToProcess(){
   
    return this.hasDataToProcess;
  }
  public synchronized void setHasDataToProcess(boolean hasData){
   
    this.hasDataToProcess = hasData;  
  }
}

Thread A and B must have a reference to a shared MySignal instance for the signaling to work. If thread A and B has references to different MySignal instance, they will not detect each others signals. The data to be processed can be located in a shared buffer separate from the MySignal instance.

2. Busy Wait

Thread B which is to process the data is waiting for data to become available for processing. In other words, it is waiting for a signal from thread A which causes hasDataToProcess() to return true. Here is the loop that thread B is running in, while waiting for this signal:

protected MySignal sharedSignal = ...
...
while(!sharedSignal.hasDataToProcess()){
   
  //do nothing... busy waiting
}

Notice how the while loop keeps executing until hasDataToProcess() returns true. This is called busy waiting. The thread is busy while waiting.

3. wait(), notify() and notifyAll()

Busy waiting is not a very efficient utilization of the CPU in the computer running the waiting thread, except if the average waiting time is very small. Else, it would be smarter if the waiting thread could somehow sleep or become inactive until it receives the signal it is waiting for.
Java has a builtin wait mechanism that enable threads to become inactive while waiting for signals. The class java.lang.Object defines three methods, wait(), notify(), and notifyAll(), to facilitate this.
A thread that calls wait() on any object becomes inactive until another thread calls notify() on that object. In order to call either wait() or notify the calling thread must first obtain the lock on that object. In other words, the calling thread must call wait() or notify() from inside a synchronized block. Here is a modified version of MySignal called MyWaitNotify that uses wait() and notify().

public class MonitorObject