Efficient C++ Performance Programming Techniques

Reader/Writer Locks

Another way to ease the pain of synchronization is to relax the requirement that one and only one thread may have exclusive access to shared data. The need to serialize access to shared data stems from the fact that the shared data may be modified by one of the threads accessing it. It follows that we must give exclusive access only to those threads aiming to modify shared data (writers). Conversely, threads that are merely interested in reading shared data (readers) could access shared data concurrently.

Reader/writer locks are those that allow multiple readers to access shared data instead of waiting for exclusive access. A thread trying to get read access to shared data will be granted read access in one of two cases: