Java Concurrency in Practice

There is often a tension between safety and liveness. We use locking to ensure thread safety, but indiscriminate use of locking can cause lock-ordering deadlocks. Similarly, we use thread pools and semaphores to bound resource consumption, but failur...

is illustrated by the classic, if somewhat unsanitary, "dining philosophers" problem. Five philosophers go out for Chinese food and are seated at a circular table. There are five chopsticks (not five pairs), one placed between each pair of ...

10.2. A program that never acquires more than one lock at a time cannot experience lock-ordering deadlock. Of course, this is not always practical, but if you can get away with it, it's a lot less work. If you must acquire multiple locks, lock orde...

While deadlock is the most widely encountered liveness hazard, there are several other liveness hazards you may encounter in concurrent programs including starvation, missed signals, and livelock. (Missed signals are covered in Section 14.2.3.)1. Sta...

Liveness failures are a serious problem because there is no way to recover from them short of aborting the application. The most common form of liveness failure is lock-ordering deadlock. Avoiding lock ordering deadlock starts at design time: ensure ...