4.3. Fairly Sharing a Resource
Our dining philosophers implementation was successful in that it synchronizes the actions of multiple processes competing for limited resources and prevents them from entering into a deadlocked state. However, there is one potential problem it doesn't make any attempt to solve—starvation. Starvation occurs when a process can't access an available resource, because other processes are beating it to the mark—either they are faster, or on a better network connection, or have some other competitive advantage. The dining philosophers code makes no guarantee that every philosopher will eventually get a turn to eat, or that philosophers will eat with the same frequency. Your fellow philosophers might repeatedly beat you ...
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