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Asked: 2026-05-19T13:02:01+00:00

I was wondering what is the performance benefit of using condition variables over mutex

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I was wondering what is the performance benefit of using condition variables over mutex locks in pthreads.

What I found is : “Without condition variables, the programmer would need to have threads continually polling (possibly in a critical section), to check if the condition is met. This can be very resource consuming since the thread would be continuously busy in this activity. A condition variable is a way to achieve the same goal without polling.” (https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/pthreads)

But it also seems that mutex calls are blocking (unlike spin-locks). Hence if a thread (T1) fails to get a lock because some other thread (T2) has the lock, T1 is put to sleep by the OS, and is woken up only when T2 releases the lock and the OS gives T1 the lock. The thread T1 does not really poll to get the lock. From this description, it seems that there is no performance benefit of using condition variables. In either case, there is no polling involved. The OS anyway provides the benefit that the condition-variable paradigm can provide.

Can you please explain what actually happens.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    A condition variable allows a thread to be signaled when something of interest to that thread occurs.

    By itself, a mutex doesn’t do this.

    If you just need mutual exclusion, then condition variables don’t do anything for you. However, if you need to know when something happens, then condition variables can help.

    For example, if you have a queue of items to work on, you’ll have a mutex to ensure the queue’s internals are consistent when accessed by the various producer and consumer threads. However, when the queue is empty, how will a consumer thread know when something is in there for it to work on? Without something like a condition variable it would need to poll the queue, taking and releasing the mutex on each poll (otherwise a producer thread could never put something on the queue).

    Using a condition variable lets the consumer find that when the queue is empty it can just wait on the condition variable indicating that the queue has had something put into it. No polling – that thread does nothing until a producer puts something in the queue, then signals the condition that the queue has a new item.

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