The Perils of Concurrency
Right now, you’re probably thinking “I can get better throughput by breaking up my problem and letting multiple threads work on these parts.” Unfortunately, problems rarely can be divided into isolated parts that can be run totally independent of each other. Often, we can perform some operations independently but then have to merge the partial results to get the final result. This requires threads to communicate the partial results and sometimes wait for those results to be ready. This requires coordination between threads and can lead to synchronization and locking woes.
We encounter three problems when developing concurrent programs: starvation, deadlock, and race conditions. The first two are somewhat easier to ...
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