Subj : Re: Lock Free -- where to start To : comp.programming.threads From : David Hopwood Date : Thu Sep 29 2005 07:41 pm David Schwartz wrote: > "Joe Seigh" wrote: > >>Lock-free is about scalability, not the actual overhead. If you know >>your application will never experience high contention or you don't care about >>scalability then you should stick with conventional lock based solutions. > > The point is, locks allow you to avoid high contention (by scheduling > tasks that don't contend). Lock free algorithms, in general, force you to > suffer through it (by allowing contending tasks to continue attempting to > run in parallel). Note that message passing also allows you to avoid high contention by scheduling tasks that don't contend. This is independent of whether the synchronization needed for message passing between processes scheduled on different processors/cores is implemented in terms of locks or by lock-free techniques. -- David Hopwood .