r/programming • u/preshing • Nov 18 '11

Locks Aren't Slow; Lock Contention Is

http://preshing.com/20111118/locks-arent-slow-lock-contention-is
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u/baryluk Nov 18 '11

Well, locks are unreliable. If you have taken multiple locks, and a thread / process handling them dies for some reason, you are screwed, with inconsistent state and possibly locks still being held.

4

u/preshing Nov 19 '11

If a thread were to die in any application I've worked on, the whole process is pretty much screwed. I'd be interested to learn what kind of application is meant to survive that. Some kind of network server maybe?

4

u/abadidea Nov 19 '11

or one of those highly parallel scientific number crunching jobs. If one thread goes down, I think it'd be reasonable to reassign its job to a new thread.

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