In the previous four articles in my Unintuitive Multithreading series, I focused mostly on design of a multi-threaded application. This time, I plan to cover a few techniques that I have found helpful in troubleshooting multi-threaded applications. To some extent, the normal techniques you have used for troubleshooting will work in a multi-threaded program. But,… Read More »
Continuing my exploration of misunderstandings about multi-threading, this essay is about simplicity. If you are interested in the previous essays in this series, they can be found on the series page. This time I plan to start with an assertion that almost everyone will agree with and push it more than most people would. The… Read More »
This essay continues my exploration of misunderstandings about multi-threading. In the first essay of this series, Unintuitive Multithreading: Speed, I explained that multi-threading does not inherently speed up a process. In the second essay Unintuitive Multithreading: Waiting for Performance, I showed how to achieve better performance through waiting. In this essay, I plan to attack… Read More »
This essay continues my exploration of misunderstandings about multi-threading. In the first essay of this series, Unintuitive Multithreading: Speed, I explained that multi-threading does not inherently speed up a process. In this essay, I plan to show how to not achieve more performance from a multi-threaded system. Many new multi-threading (MT) developers make the same… Read More »
This begins a short series of essays on what most programmers get wrong about multi-threading. Over and over again, I’ve seen programmers make the same mistakes in multi-threaded applications on multiple operating systems and in multiple languages. So I decided to give you the benefits of what little insight I have into the problem. The… Read More »
This is a very simple concept that seems to escape many people. In fact, most of the multi-threaded code I’ve seen shows a distinct misunderstanding of this basic fact. Very often people seem to think that a mutex should protect a section of code. I think this misconception may have been caused by the term… Read More »
There is a subtle aspect of threads that may be worth exploring having to do with the concept of joining. Many threading systems support the possibility of waiting until a thread completes in order to retrieve its exit state. This is often started through a function called join(). In order to support this feature, a… Read More »