[Python-Dev] deja-vu .. python locking (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Mon Sep 18 22:21:51 CEST 2006

Martin Devera schrieb:

It is based on assumption that an object is typicaly used by single thread. You must lock it anyway just for case if another thread steps on it. The idea is that each object is "owned" by a thread. Owner can use its objects without locking. If a thread wants to use foreign object then it has to wait for owning thread to go to some safe place (out of interpreter, into LOCK of other object..). It is done by per-thread lock and it is neccessary because owner does no locking, thus you can be sure that nobody it using the object when former owner is somewhere out of the object.

Ah, I think I understand now. First the minor critique: I believe the locking algorithm isn't thread-safe:

while (ob->owner_thread != self_thread()) { unlock_mutex(thread_mutex[self_thread()]) // wait for owning thread to go to quiscent state lock_mutex(thread_mutex[ob->owner_thread]) ob->owner_thread = self_thread() unlock_mutex(thread_mutex[ob->owner_thread]) lock_mutex(thread_mutex[self_thread()]) }

If two threads are competing for the same object held by a third thread, they may simultaneously enter the while loop, and then simultaneously try to lock the owner_thread. Now, one will win, and own the object. Later, the other will gain the lock, and unconditionally overwrite ownership. This will cause two threads to own the objects, which is an error.

The more fundamental critique is: Why? It seems you do this to improve efficiency, (implicitly) claiming that it is more efficient to keep holding the lock, instead of releasing and re-acquiring it each time.

I claim that this doesn't really matter: any reasonable mutex implementation will be "fast" if there is no lock contention. On locking, it will not invoke any system call if the lock is currently not held (but just atomically test-and-set some field of the lock); on unlocking, it will not invoke any system call if the wait list is empty. As you also need to test, there shouldn't be much of a performance difference.

Regards, Martin

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