Software Architecture Design Patterns in Java

44 READ-WRITE LOCK

This pattern was previously described in Grand98 and is based on the material that appeared in Lea97.

DESCRIPTION

During the discussion of the Monitor and the Critical Section patterns earlier, we saw that when multiple threads in an application simultaneously access a resource it could result in unpredictable behavior. Hence the resource must be protected so that only one thread at a time is allowed to access the resource. Though this may be required in most cases, it may lead to unwanted CPU overhead when some of the threads accessing the resource are interested only in reading the values or state of the resource but not in changing it. In such cases, it can be inefficient to prevent a thread from accessing the resource ...