Wait() vs sleep()

Question

This is a purely general question, I was wondering which is better to use: sleep() or wait()?

Answer 1

Use sleep() if you just want to wait for some time,
for example if you want to wait before you retry to
create a socket connection when the first try failed.
This is wrong. Never use sleep when you are using synchronization, it could cause deadlocks. Instead, use wait as wait will release all your locks and thus reduce the chance of deadlock. Remember that your thread may be holding locks that you are unaware of so it's best to wait (not sleep).
Use wait() if you want to synchronize multiple
threads, for examplw when one thread has to wait for
the resutl of another thread. >
So fi you have only one thread ( and i assume that
have you never written a multithreaded app) just use
sleep() adn forget wait(). They might look similar but
serve quite different purposes.
Java is multithreaded by nature, it's impossible to write a non-multithreaded application in java as there are at least a few threads ( finalizer thread, GC thread, your main thread). And any non-trivial java program will have at least 2 threads. Any java application that uses swing has at least 7 threads. So you must expect that your code will be run in multiple threads and thus sleep is not a good choice.
I don't think that using sleep should be recomended because it doesn't release locks.