Yes, you are right - and my previous comment somewhat skims over the details. Sorry for that. :) The difference in a single-core scenario is that the threads c

Yes, you are right - and my previous comment somewhat skims over the details. Sorry for that. :) The difference in a single-core scenario is that the threads can't all become starved because a thread on another CPU holds the lock - the VM will simply cycle to the next thread and continue. In interpreted mode you don't even suffer a context switch. One edge case is where a thread acquires a lock and is then itself put to sleep because of blocking I/O or trying to obtain another lock. But that is simply a bad practice.