What is lock thrashing?

Answer 1

Lock thrashing occurs in concurrent programming when multiple threads or processes repeatedly attempt to acquire the same lock, leading to excessive contention and significant performance degradation. This situation can arise when the granularity of locking is too coarse or when the critical section protected by the lock is too large, causing threads to spend more time waiting for the lock rather than executing useful work. As a result, the overall throughput of the system decreases, and the efficiency of parallel execution is undermined. To mitigate lock thrashing, developers can employ finer-grained locking strategies or alternative synchronization mechanisms.