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Graph/lock-release-concurrency-misconception

Pattern

Global Lock Release Misconception

lock-release-concurrency-misconception

Concurrency in runtimes misleads developers when blocking calls (e.g., Python sleep) or native-thread parallelism appear to allow simultaneous progress, but hidden locks (GIL/driver mutexes or multi-lock waits) cause stalls, deadlocks, or misleading “flushed” success.

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Updated6/28/2026

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30 linked nodes

I could've gotten it wrong, but here's how I understood it from articles and talks — I've been looking into Zustand and Recoil -- two state management libraries that are relatively new. Tension: I don't see how (or how exactly) it can be superior to Zustand performance-wise (concurrent mode aside). Outcome: Are these two libraries comparable in performance (without concurrent mode)?

As long as you lock more than a single thing at a time, you risk deadlocks. — lock more than a single thing at a time. Tension: You hold B waiting for A, they hold A waiting for B. Outcome: one of you has to abort or you're stuck.

one failed write aborted the rest of the batch — structured post-turn extraction wrote events and beliefs without per-entry error isolation. Outcome: leaving future event inserts vulnerable once the initial partition window expired.

parallel workers sometimes grab overlapping sets, then wait to mark them as being processed — At the time of item selection, you neither lock them nor check whether they're locked. Tension: someone else could've already grabbed a subset of those. Outcome: duplicate their work on the items they happened to share.

the cache doesn't work across processes — workers might be pre-forked. Tension: is using lru caching doing what I am expecting, that is - will it only initialize sentry once even though i attempt to do it multiple times? Outcome: provided it's called within the same process.

sqlite3.OperationalError: database is locked. — I trigger `/session_a` and `/session_b` almost simultaneously. Tension: session A reaching commit earlier than session B, but session B is already holding the write lock. Outcome: A will inevitably fail with a database is locked error.

the two requests are executed "in parallel." — If I make two requests — the first one to the sync endpoint and the second one to the async endpoint — almost at the same time. Tension: I expected the event loop to be blocked. Outcome: the two requests are executed "in parallel.".

The idea is to update this model once hourly without blocking the API's ability to respond. Tension: update this model once hourly without blocking the API's ability to respond to CPU-bound tasks. Outcome: this is all good.

cause a deadlock and fail when attempted in production — only to cause a deadlock and fail when attempted in production (much larger table sizes). Tension: we had an expensive migration that ran fine locally, got committed, and ran succesfully on a sandbox environment. Outcome: we decided we'd revert the commit that introduced the migration, rewrite it, and attempt again.

Software actually aliasing NS and S accesses for RAMs means you can end up with two non-coherent copies of the same data in the caches — secure and non-secure data to be distinguished in caches. Tension: which can desync because of the lack of coherency. Outcome: This is why secure world page tables can be set up with NS=1 pages.

Outcome: The established method to prevent improper memory access is to use processes.

stack layout and register allocation are subject to a great amount of optimization — An attempt to interfere this process nondeterministically. Tension: benchmarks will become useless. Outcome: nondeterministic performance.

those polls might be scheduled in parallel — make this concurrent. Tension: there is no ordering guarantee.

Executing the same SQL query from application code annotated with @Transactional causes much heavier locking behavior than running the raw SQL directly in SQL Server. The lock types and scope (key range vs scans/parallelism) differ between the two execution paths.

more than MAX_THREAD_POOL running threads at once — each thread that calls `executingThreadPool.add` immediately uses `executingThreadPool.poll`. Tension: your locks don't prevent more than MAX_THREAD_POOL running threads at once. Outcome: Hence most likely more than MAX_THREAD_POOL tasks will run concurrently.

Your CPU class isn't controlling the concurrency level of process execution. — The threads you start in CPUDemo are doing their own processing. Tension: the CPU isn't starting the "processing" threads itself. Outcome: Try to to decouple thread creation from task execution.

Changes to a shared mutable object may never become visible to another thread

The behavior is that I expected is that each threads enqueues and deques in the sequential order that the threads used in enqueue the values, but this is not the case. — using `built-in java ArrayBlockingQueue` and `custom implementation`. Outcome: q.add(...) and q.poll() may alternate.

Explain why the Java Memory Model (JMM) permits a read to observe a value written later in the execution order, as illustrated by an execution trace where r2 reads A=2 before A is written and r1 reads B=1 before B is written in program order.

But it doesn't work like that. — I wanted to try power of virtual threads in Java in a simple application which consists of many tasks. Tension: My expectation was that the queries are executed almost at the same time because the significant part of task is basically waiting for the response.

This happens only when in create a "Release" build, not for "Debug " builds. — when heap-allocating (`new bool`, `make_unique`, ...) but not when stack-allocating in the same location. Tension: I was not able to reduce the code the code any further. Outcome: The code exhibits undefined behavior.

Suppose #0 reads `strong == 1`. That requires: Both `fetch_sub` operations (#2 and #3) have already happened before #0. Tension: Threads that "shouldn't" modify the counter get stuck before performing the release operations that would allow #0 to see a reduced count. Outcome: So the uniqueness test is valid and future-proof.

what are the correct values of three highlighted parameters? — when it comes to intrusive lockless stacks (single-linked lists). Tension: I've seen various permutations of highlighted parameters. Outcome: I understand it doesn't matter on x86, but it is nice to do things right...

Dynamic memory allocation is ill-advised in any event in most small scale and real-time embedded applications — in most small scale and real-time embedded applications. Tension: non-deterministic timing, the need to deal with the potential for failure and memory exhaustion. Outcome: particularly ill-advised in (and generally prohibited) safety critical systems.

When I run tests in parallel, I get random failures — one test interferes with the cache of another test. Tension: one test interferes with the cache of another test.

Go goroutine blocks forever on a channel send after parent context cancellation

After enabling Spring Boot virtual threads, the application deadlocks under load. Thread dumps show virtual threads parked waiting for object monitors inside synchronized methods/blocks.

Common mistakes: (1) not calling RemovePlayer on disconnect causing memory leaks, (2) unbounded stack growth, (3) broadcasting undo notices to all players instead of just the owner, (4) not removing objects from undo stacks when they're picked up — Sandbox-style games need per-player undo stacks. Tension: allowing players to undo weapons out of other players' hands.

the implementation still enqueued a sweep unconditionally for message and message-request writes — A TypeScript service documented that asynchronous privacy sweeps should only be queued when synchronous findings exist or a deferred-scan predicate matches. Tension: the implementation still enqueued a sweep unconditionally. Outcome: for message and message-request writes.

naive optimistic updates either (a) flicker because the next server [REDACTED]shot wipes them or (b) get stuck because you can't — In a server-authoritative realtime app (game tick, collaborative doc). Tension: the next server [REDACTED]shot wipes them. Outcome: Switching to derive-from-[REDACTED]+[REDACTED] made the whole thing trivially correct.

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