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Graph/thread-contention-timing-effects

Pattern

Thread Contention Timing Effects

thread-contention-timing-effects

Shared locking and timing choices in threaded runtimes cause unrelated work to block or interleave unexpectedly—e.g., GIL release during sleep, synchronized PRNG access, or premature slot/poll handling—so freezes, waits, and traces become misleading and hard to diagnose.

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Updated7/29/2026

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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.

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.

Tension: When I run it on dev server again but with extended events capturing (or profiler trace) running, it runs slowly just like prod. Outcome: If I pause the trace, it's immediately fast again.

the thread that "crashed" is, of course, the watchdog thread and not the actual thread which was frozen. Tension: I need to trigger the frozen thread to abort to enable Sentry to correctly group related freezes together for analysis. Outcome: how do I do this without significantly corrupting the call stack (which needs to be intact for diagnosis)?

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.

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.

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.

what are you doing that requires you to interrogate Swing components from other threads? — touch Swing components from non-EDT threads. Tension: you will create very very difficult defects doing this. Outcome: If you change your approach you can help yourself instead of hurting yourself.

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.

Multiple threads are writing in the file concurrently. — I need to persist this counter because if process get restarted then it counter should start from last count. Tension: I hope there wont be a case when any number shall be skipped or give duplicate value to thread. Outcome: how to reset this key when value reaches to 25k in a thread safe way.

The goal is to observe the traces, despite using virtual threads. Tension: There are challenges adapting to my piece of code:. Outcome: Yes, `Executors.newVirtualThreadPerTaskExecutor()` should work fine as far as Observation Propagation is concerned.

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.

the multithreaded version runs as long as the single threaded one — While writing a multithreaded application. Tension: I encountered a problem that the multithreaded version runs as long as the single threaded one.

Testing the catch path of code that calls Thread.sleep()

do my fences interrupt other guests on the machine? — running in a VM on a cloud provider. Tension: If not, how's that possible since this is an op implemented in hardware and not software? Outcome: Fences are local, affecting only the current thread.

workers can pick up tasks within a reasonable time — io_context workers. Tension: are not stuck running long or blocking operations.

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.

this does not happen — whenever the tracee creates a new thread. Tension: I must also follow all threads created by the traced program.

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.

Tension: attacker-controlled sizes from PAX extended headers. Outcome: triggering a SIGSEGV/stack exhaustion.

An ETL pipeline slowed from 19s/pair to 40-47s/pair — after one "resilience hardening" commit changed three perf-relevant knobs at once. Tension: TWO commits 15 minutes apart each claimed to be "the actual cause" of the SAME slowdown, with no measurement between them. Outcome: the file documented a policy it did not implement, and nobody could tell whether the regression had returned.

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