Patent ID: 7765555

Claim:
A method for facilitating bulk lock-unbiasing for objects within an object-based computing system, comprising: maintaining an epoch for a biasable object class and each instance of the biasable object class, wherein the epoch is a field containing a timestamp; wherein if the epoch for the biasable object class matches the epoch for a specific instance of the biasable object class, any bias for the specific instance is currently valid; receiving a signal to perform a bulk lock-unbiasing operation for instances of the biasable object class; in response to the signal, stopping all threads in the object-based computing system at a safe point, and performing a bulk lock-unbiasing operation for unlocked instances of the biasable object class by incrementing the epoch for the biasable object class and by incrementing corresponding epochs for locked instances of the biasable object class; and upon encountering a lock-acquisition operation while executing a current thread, wherein the lock-acquisition operation attempts to acquire a lock for the specific instance, examining synchronization information associated with the specific instance, wherein the process of examining the synchronization information does not involve atomic operations, and if the synchronization information indicates that the lock is biasable, the lock is biased toward the current thread, and the epoch of the specific instance matches the epoch of the biasable object class, allowing the current thread to acquire the lock without updating the synchronization information.