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Busy-waiting itself can be made much less wasteful by using a delay function (e.g., sleep()) found in most operating systems. This puts a thread to sleep for a specified time, during which the thread will waste no CPU time. If the loop is checking something simple then it will spend most of its time asleep and will waste very little CPU time.
lock contention: this occurs whenever one process or thread attempts to acquire a lock held by another process or thread. The more fine-grained the available locks, the less likely one process/thread will request a lock held by the other. (For example, locking a row rather than the entire table, or locking a cell rather than the entire row);
Alternatively an RW lock can be implemented in terms of a condition variable, cond, an ordinary (mutex) lock, g, and various counters and flags describing the threads that are currently active or waiting. [7] [8] [9] For a write-preferring RW lock one can use two integer counters and one Boolean flag:
As soon as the first thread in question is switched back to, its program counter will be at step 1c, and it will sleep and be unable to be woken up again, violating the invariant that it should have been on c's sleep-queue when it slept. Other race conditions depend on the ordering of steps 1a and 1b, and depend on where a context switch occurs.
A few multi-core processors have a "power-conscious spin-lock" instruction that puts a processor to sleep, then wakes it up on the next cycle after the lock is freed. A spin-lock using such instructions is more efficient and uses less energy than spin locks with or without a back-off loop.
In computer science, a semaphore is a variable or abstract data type used to control access to a common resource by multiple threads and avoid critical section problems in a concurrent system such as a multitasking operating system.
The sleep library function, on the other hand, is implemented via the alarm syscall on many older systems, thus it only works by delivering a signal. The Windows Sleep function is non-interruptible due to absence of signals (other than the thread or its process being terminated), although the related SleepEx function can be used to put the ...
Schematic representation of how threads work under GIL. Green - thread holding GIL, red - blocked threads. A global interpreter lock (GIL) is a mechanism used in computer-language interpreters to synchronize the execution of threads so that only one native thread (per process) can execute basic operations (such as memory allocation and reference counting) at a time. [1]