Light vs heavy mutex

I discovered a nice post at Preshing on Programming that discusses Light vs Heavy Mutexes. Mutexes are what allow you to do critical sections which, in turn, allow you to create programs that run on multiple processors. That got me thinking about how Java's "synchronize" keyword is implemented. Using Synchronized is the default way of creating critical sections. It used to be really slow but has gotten much, much faster recently. Apparently, synchronize is implemented using a combination of light and heavy locks as well as other techniques that make it even lighter than a light mutex.

http://preshing.com/20111124/always-use-a-lightweight-mutex

http://blogs.oracle.com/dave/entry/lets_say_you_re_interested

Given that so much work has been done on it, I've still had performance issues with it. Using things like AtomicInteger with its check and set is still much faster.. Assuming that you can use it (it's not always possible.).