read / write locks and deadlock detection

[Jürgen Devlieghere]

Hi,

We are creating event-driven multi-threaded applications on a daily basis.
To help us solving deadlocks, we implemented a CriticalSection class that
does dead-lock detection: an attempt to Enter() the critical section that
would cause a deadlock logs the complete deadlock loop (thread / Critical
section) and raises an exception. It has helped us a lot in the past.

However, to prevent further deadlocks, and to get a higher performance, we
want to implement read / write locks.

So, we need:
- read / write locks
- with deadlock detection
- the locks should be re-entrant (like a mutex: a thread can ask again for
the lock and gets it immediately. There is a counter inside that ensures
that the lock is only released after an equal number of calls of Leave() as
there were of Enter().

I found a good article about how to implement a read/write lock on MSDN
written by Ruediger R. Asche, but that code doesn't support re-entrance by
the same thread.

Any of you has a reference to a good article / source code / library?

I realize there are ways to avoid dead-locks:
- work with 1 worker thread (bad performance on multi-processor)
- collect data on the higher level and pass that along. That we did for as
long as the data still was contained where it belonged.

Jürgen

[Niklas Norrthon]

"Jürgen Devlieghere" <jd************ ****@voxtron.co m> writes:

Hi,

We are creating event-driven multi-threaded applications on a daily basis.

[snip]

Try comp.programmin g.threads.

/Niklas Norrthon

[peter koch]

Jürgen Devlieghere skrev:

Hi,

We are creating event-driven multi-threaded applications on a daily basis.
To help us solving deadlocks, we implemented a CriticalSection class that
does dead-lock detection: an attempt to Enter() the critical section that
would cause a deadlock logs the complete deadlock loop (thread / Critical
section) and raises an exception. It has helped us a lot in the past.

However, to prevent further deadlocks, and to get a higher performance, we
want to implement read / write locks.

So, we need:
- read / write locks
- with deadlock detection
- the locks should be re-entrant (like a mutex: a thread can ask again for
the lock and gets it immediately. There is a counter inside that ensures
that the lock is only released after an equal number of calls of Leave() as
there were of Enter().

I found a good article about how to implement a read/write lock on MSDN
written by Ruediger R. Asche, but that code doesn't support re-entrance by
the same thread.
Reentrancy is not something you should strive for unless it is
absolutely necessary. In my code I do checks when using reentrant
mutexes (or critical section or whatever you call the beast) that the
mutex is not locked twice by the same thread. The reason is (put
briefly) that you better know what your code is up to.
But this is all for comp.programmin g.threads where you should direct
your questions.

/Peter
[snip] Jürgen