Humans tend to make the same mistake again and again. We, software developers, are no different. Hello everyone, in this blog post, I’m going to talk about common concurrency bug patterns. Bug patterns give good insight into developer’s psychology, specifically, the assumptions we make about the programming languages, compilers, 3rd party code, OS scheduler, and hardware architecture.
Concurrent systems, including both multiprocessor and distributed systems, often rely on object replication for improving performance and scalability. Object replication, the idea of keeping multiple local copies of shared data structures, demands another sub-system that ensures consistency between these local copies in real-time!! Network delays in distributed systems and overlapping operations on shared data structures within multiprocessor systems are some of the major challenges in ensuring consistency. To overcome these issues, without sacrificing correctness and performance, the research community has proposed various “relaxations” in the consistency requirement that I intend to cover in the next few sections. Following is the…
