[LAD] Noob Q: Pthreads the way to go?

[Jussi Laako]

Harry Van Haaren wrote:
> That's the background to this question: Is mutex locking the only way to
> ensure that variables are only
> being accessed by one thread at a time? Is it the "right" way to go
> about it?

No, there are also semaphores and read-write locks. RW-locks are
especially useful in cases where there's a single writer but multiple
readers (typically any data distribution).

In general, threading is a wrong way to go if you find sharing and
locking a lot of data between the threads. Threads should be able to
execute fairly independently to properly utilize resources. Naturally
there are typically scatter-gather points which are supposed to be short
compared to overall thread execution time.