Why lock may become a bottleneck of multithreaded program?
If I want my queue frequently pop() and push() by multithread,
which lock should I use?
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The lock you use depends on your platform but will generally be some flavour of mutex. On windows, you would use a critical section and in .NET, you’d use a monitor. I’m not very familiar with locking mechanisms on other platforms. I’d stay away from lock free approaches. They are very difficult to program correctly and the performance gains are often not as great as you would expect.
Locks become a bottleneck in your program when they are under heavy contention. That is, a very large number of threads all try to acquire the lock at the same time. This wastes a lot of CPU cycles as threads become blocked and the OS spends a greater and greater portion of its time switching between threads. This sort of problem most frequently manifests itself in the server world. For desktop applications, it’s rare that locks will cause a performance issue.