How do determine if an object is locked (synchronized) so not to block in Java?

One thing to note is that the instant you receive such information, it's stale. In other words, you could be told that no-one has the lock, but then when you try to acquire it, you block because another thread took out the lock between the check and you trying to acquire it.

Brian is right to point at Lock, but I think what you really want is its tryLock method:

Lock lock = new ReentrantLock();
......
if (lock.tryLock())
{
    // Got the lock
    try
    {
        // Process record
    }
    finally
    {
        // Make sure to unlock so that we don't cause a deadlock
        lock.unlock();
    }
}
else
{
    // Someone else had the lock, abort
}

You can also call tryLock with an amount of time to wait - so you could try to acquire it for a tenth of a second, then abort if you can't get it (for example).

(I think it's a pity that the Java API doesn't - as far as I'm aware - provide the same functionality for the "built-in" locking, as the Monitor class does in .NET. Then again, there are plenty of other things I dislike in both platforms when it comes to threading - every object potentially having a monitor, for example!)

Take a look at the Lock objects introduced in the Java 5 concurrency packages.

e.g.

Lock lock = new ReentrantLock()
if (lock.tryLock()) {
   try {
      // do stuff using the lock...
   }
   finally {
      lock.unlock();
   }
}
   ...

The ReentrantLock object is essentially doing the same thing as the traditional synchronized mechanism, but with more functionality.

EDIT: As Jon has noted, the isLocked() method tells you at that instant, and thereafter that information is out of date. The tryLock() method will give more reliable operation (note you can use this with a timeout as well)

EDIT #2: Example now includes tryLock()/unlock() for clarity.

I found this, we can use Thread.holdsLock(Object obj) to check if an object is locked:

Returns true if and only if the current thread holds the monitor lock on the specified object.

Note that Thread.holdsLock() returns false if the lock is held by something and the calling thread isn't the thread that holds the lock.

Whilst the above approach using a Lock object is the best way to do it, if you have to be able to check for locking using a monitor, it can be done. However, it does come with a health warning as the technique isn't portable to non Oracle Java VMs and it may break in future VM versions as it isn't a supported public API.

Here is how to do it:

private static sun.misc.Unsafe getUnsafe() {
    try {
        Field field = sun.misc.Unsafe.class.getDeclaredField("theUnsafe");
        field.setAccessible(true);
        return (Unsafe) field.get(null);
    } catch (Exception e) {
        throw new RuntimeException(e);
    }
}

public void doSomething() {
  Object record = new Object();
  sun.misc.Unsafe unsafe = getUnsafe(); 
  if (unsafe.tryMonitorEnter(record)) {
    try {
      // record is locked - perform operations on it
    } finally {
      unsafe.monitorExit(record);
    }
  } else {
      // could not lock record
  }
}

My advice would be to use this approach only if you cannot refactor your code to use java.util.concurrent Lock objects for this and if you are running on an Oracle VM.