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Much attention has been given by Sun, IBM, BEA and others to optimize lock management and synchronization in their respective Java 6 virtual machine offerings. Features like biased locking, lock coarsening, lock elision by escape analysis and adaptive spin locking are all designed to increase concurrency by allowing more effective sharing amongst application threads. As sophisticated and interesting as each of these features are, the question is; will they actually make good on these promises? In this two part article I will explore these features and attempt to answer the performance question with the aid of a single threaded benchmark.