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Lockless Queues

For Beginners

Started by lordcorm June 22, 2008 06:22 PM

2 comments, last by lordcorm 15 years, 10 months ago

lordcorm

100

Author

June 22, 2008 06:22 PM

Im having a little trouble sorting out what a lockless queue is and when to use it. What i want to know is: * is it a way to make variable accessing safe on any thread? For any purpose? Or is it just a normal stl queue that is lock-less for storing information? * when using it, do i have to push every variable that i want to be threadsafe into the queue when i want to modify the variable? * or, do i have it all wrong? Please enlighten me. Lordcorm

Yann L

1,806

June 22, 2008 06:37 PM

Without any further context, a lockless queue is a queue container that has been made threadsafe by using a lockfree algorithm, ie. one that uses special CPU instructions (CAS or similar) to avoid locking a thread (like a critical section or mutex would do). This allows for significant performance increases if many threads try to access the queue concurrently.

It doesn't mean anything more than that.