OperationParker is an interface offered by SPI for the objects, such as Lock and Semaphore, to be used when a thread needs to wait for a lock to be released. You can see the OperationParker source code here.
OperationParker keeps a list of waiters. For each notify operation:
- it looks for a waiter,
- it asks the waiter whether it wants to keep waiting,
- if the waiter responds no, the service executes its registered operation (operation itself knows where to send a response),
- it rinses and repeats until a waiter wants to keep waiting.
Each waiter can sit on a wait-notify queue for, at most, its operation's call timeout. For example, by default, each waiter can wait here for at most 1 minute. A continuous task scans expired/timed-out waiters and invalidates them with CallTimeoutException. Each waiter on the remote side should retry and keep waiting if it still wants to wait. This is a liveness check for remote waiters.
This way, it is possible to distinguish an unresponsive member and a long (~infinite) wait. On the caller side, if the waiting thread does not get a response for either a call timeout or for more than 2 times the call-timeout, it will exit with OperationTimeoutException.
Note that this behavior breaks the fairness. Hazelcast does not support fairness for any of the data structures with blocking operations, such as Lock and Semaphore.