Hands-On System Programming with Go

Write starvation

When designing an application, this kind of mutex is not always the obvious choice, because in a scenario where there is a greater number of read locks and a few write ones, the mutex will be accepting incoming more read locks after the first, letting the write operation wait for a moment where there are no read locks active. This is a phenomenon referred to as write starvation.

To check this out, we can define a type that has both a write and a read operation, which take some time, as shown in the following code:

type counter struct {    m sync.RWMutex    value int}func (c *counter) Write(i int) {    c.m.Lock()    time.Sleep(time.Millisecond * 100)    c.value = i    c.m.Unlock()}func (c *counter) Value() int {    c.m.RLock() time.Sleep(time.Millisecond ...