Subj : Re: How to manage time-slicing in Pthreads programs?
To   : comp.programming.threads
From : D'artagnan
Date : Sat Feb 19 2005 06:01 pm

OK, maybe I didn't explain the situation clearly in my first post. In
my example, I don't want thread A to put itself to sleep, I want thread
B to put it to sleep and wake it up later.  Consider the following
senario: thread A and thread B are processing a huge collection of
items, one-by-one. The workload is split up between the two threads
such that 99% chance there aren't conflicting accesses between the two
threads.  For the 1% chance of conflicting accesses we need some
protection. The problem is that thread A never knows which items will
cause conflicting accesses, only thread B has this knowledge.
Therefore, pthread_cond_wait() doesn't apply here because (1) thead A
doesn't know when to wait; and (2) if thread B calls it and goes to
sleep, there is nobody to wake it up.

The desired scheme would be: When thread B becomes aware of a potential
conflicting access, it puts thread A into sleep. Thread B finishes the
access, then wakes thread A up. Are there any ways to do this? Thanks.

.