A study of locking objects with bimodal fields
Tamiya Onodera, Kiyokuni Kawachiya · 1999
Object locking can be efficiently implemented by bimodal use of a field reserved in an object. The field is used as a lightweight lock in one mode, while it holds a reference to a heavyweight lock in the other mode. A bimodal locking algorithm recently proposed for Java achieves the highest performance in the absence of contention, and is still fast enough when contention occurs.