26 Aug
2004
26 Aug
'04
5:26 p.m.
in other words,
how much better (apart from being more elegant) are lock
free structures wrt a mutex approach where there is a minimal system
penalty? (not many collisions) did anyone look into this? or have i not
been lurking properly? ;)
OK, futexes are fast in the uncontested case so, with sufficiently rare
collisions, you expect performance to approach that of a lock-free
implementation.
And in terms of overall throughput, it probably does. But in terms of
worst case delay when there *is* a collision things are no better. The
point of the lock-free approach is to minimise this worst case delay in
a real-time system, so if this is important to you then lock-free is the
way to go (but see below).
I'm not sure if/when they'll become
mainstream, but fuqueues might also be
worth a quick look. (Yes: It is an unfortunate name. Enough said.)
thanks for the tip. sure looks interesting.
seems i need to do more digging before attacking the issue.
cheers
tom