Question

(In short: main()’s WaitForSingleObject hangs in the program below).

I’m trying to write a piece of code that dispatches threads and waits for them to finish before it resumes. Instead of creating the threads every time, which is costly, I put them to sleep. The main thread creates X threads in CREATE_SUSPENDED state.

The synch is done with a semaphore with X as MaximumCount. The semaphore’s counter is put down to zero and the threads are dispatched. The threds perform some silly loop and call ReleaseSemaphore before they go to sleep. Then the main thread uses WaitForSingleObject X times to be sure every thread finished its job and is sleeping. Then it loops and does it all again.

From time to time the program does not exit. When I beak the program I can see that WaitForSingleObject hangs. This means that a thread’s ReleaseSemaphore did not work. Nothing is printf’ed so supposedly nothing went wrong.

Maybe two threads shouldn’t call ReleaseSemaphore at the exact same time, but that would nullify the purpose of semaphores…

I just don’t grok it…

Other solutions to synch threads are gratefully accepted!

#define TRY  100
#define LOOP 100

HANDLE *ids;
HANDLE semaphore;

DWORD WINAPI Count(__in LPVOID lpParameter)
{ 
 float x = 1.0f;   
 while(1)
 { 
  for (int i=1 ; i<LOOP ; i++)
   x = sqrt((float)i*x);
  while (ReleaseSemaphore(semaphore,1,NULL) == FALSE)
   printf(" ReleaseSemaphore error : %d ", GetLastError());
  SuspendThread(ids[(int) lpParameter]);
 }
 return (DWORD)(int)x;
}

int main()
{
 SYSTEM_INFO sysinfo;
 GetSystemInfo( &sysinfo );
 int numCPU = sysinfo.dwNumberOfProcessors;

 semaphore = CreateSemaphore(NULL, numCPU, numCPU, NULL);
 ids = new HANDLE[numCPU];

 for (int j=0 ; j<numCPU ; j++)
  ids[j] = CreateThread(NULL, 0, Count, (LPVOID)j, CREATE_SUSPENDED, NULL);

 for (int j=0 ; j<TRY ; j++)
 {
  for (int i=0 ; i<numCPU ; i++)
  {
   if (WaitForSingleObject(semaphore,1) == WAIT_TIMEOUT)
    printf("Timed out !!!\n");
   ResumeThread(ids[i]);  
  }
  for (int i=0 ; i<numCPU ; i++)
   WaitForSingleObject(semaphore,INFINITE);
  ReleaseSemaphore(semaphore,numCPU,NULL);
 }
 CloseHandle(semaphore);
 printf("Done\n");
 getc(stdin);
}

Answer 1

the problem happens in the following case:

the main thread resumes the worker threads:

  for (int i=0 ; i<numCPU ; i++)
  {
   if (WaitForSingleObject(semaphore,1) == WAIT_TIMEOUT)
    printf("Timed out !!!\n");
   ResumeThread(ids[i]);  
  }

the worker threads do their work and release the semaphore:

  for (int i=1 ; i<LOOP ; i++)
   x = sqrt((float)i*x);
  while (ReleaseSemaphore(semaphore,1,NULL) == FALSE)

the main thread waits for all worker threads and resets the semaphore:

  for (int i=0 ; i<numCPU ; i++)
   WaitForSingleObject(semaphore,INFINITE);
  ReleaseSemaphore(semaphore,numCPU,NULL);

the main thread goes into the next round, trying to resume the worker threads (note that the worker threads haven’t event suspended themselves yet! this is where the problem starts… you are trying to resume threads that aren’t necessarily suspended yet):

  for (int i=0 ; i<numCPU ; i++)
  {
   if (WaitForSingleObject(semaphore,1) == WAIT_TIMEOUT)
    printf("Timed out !!!\n");
   ResumeThread(ids[i]);  
  }

finally the worker threads suspend themselves (although they should already start the next round):

  SuspendThread(ids[(int) lpParameter]);

and the main thread waits forever since all workers are suspended now:

  for (int i=0 ; i<numCPU ; i++)
   WaitForSingleObject(semaphore,INFINITE);

here’s a link that shows how to correctly solve producer/consumer problems:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Producer-consumer_problem

also i think critical sections are much faster than semaphores and mutexes. they’re also easier to understand in most cases (imo).