Visual Basic 2005 for Programmers: Deitel Developer Series, Second Edition

15.8. Producer/Consumer Relationship: Circular Buffer

Figures 15.9–15.10 use thread synchronization to guarantee that two threads manipulate data in a shared buffer correctly. However, the application may not perform optimally. If the two threads operate at different speeds, one will spend more (or most) of its time waiting. For example, in Fig. 15.9 we shared a single integer between the two threads. If the producer thread produces values faster than the consumer can consume them, then the producer thread waits for the consumer, because there are no other locations in memory to place the next value. Similarly, if the consumer consumes faster than the producer can produce values, the consumer waits until the producer places the next value in ...