Subj : Re: Lock Free -- where to start
To   : comp.programming.threads
From : Oliver S.
Date : Thu Sep 29 2005 12:51 am

>> But for application code, or even most libraries
>> on top of threading libraries, it's a pure loss.

> Application code would not use raw lock-free structures directly.
> They would use a library that exports a "portable API".

I think what David means, is that lock-free is over-emphasized and I
must agree on that. With producer/consumer-patterns typical in server
-applications, intervals where queues are locked are extremely short
(in the best case only a pointer is fetched from a queue) and the
processing-intervals when a dequeued item is processed at least some
thousand times higher. So there's no real need for lock-free queues.
Lock-free lifo-pools may make sense for memory-allocators, but good
allocators magage thread-local pools so this need is minimized. And
if you need maximum performance on memory-allocation, you manage your
own pools.
Lock-free processing may look fascinating, but primarily superfluous.

.