Mutex Flavors

Intel® oneAPI Threading Building Blocks Developer Guide and API Reference

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Date 3/31/2023

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Mutex Flavors

Connoisseurs of mutexes distinguish various attributes of mutexes. It helps to know some of these, because they involve tradeoffs of generality and efficiency. Picking the right one often helps performance. Mutexes can be described by the following qualities, also summarized in the table below.

Scalable. Some mutexes are called scalable. In a strict sense, this is not an accurate name, because a mutex limits execution to one thread at a time. A scalable mutex is one that does not do worse than this. A mutex can do worse than serialize execution if the waiting threads consume excessive processor cycles and memory bandwidth, reducing the speed of threads trying to do real work. Scalable mutexes are often slower than non-scalable mutexes under light contention, so a non-scalable mutex may be better. When in doubt, use a scalable mutex.
Fair. Mutexes can be fair or unfair. A fair mutex lets threads through in the order they arrived. Fair mutexes avoid starving threads. Each thread gets its turn. However, unfair mutexes can be faster, because they let threads that are running go through first, instead of the thread that is next in line which may be sleeping on account of an interrupt.
Yield or Block. This is an implementation detail that impacts performance. On long waits, an Intel® oneAPI Threading Building Blocks (oneTBB) mutex either yields or blocks. Here yields means to repeatedly poll whether progress can be made, and if not, temporarily yield ¹ the processor. To block means to yield the processor until the mutex permits progress. Use the yielding mutexes if waits are typically short and blocking mutexes if waits are typically long.

The following is a summary of mutex behaviors:

spin_mutex is non-scalable, unfair, non-recursive, and spins in user space. It would seem to be the worst of all possible worlds, except that it is very fast in lightly contended situations. If you can design your program so that contention is somehow spread out among many spin_mutex objects, you can improve performance over using other kinds of mutexes. If a mutex is heavily contended, your algorithm will not scale anyway. Consider redesigning the algorithm instead of looking for a more efficient lock.
mutex has behavior similar to the spin_mutex. However, the mutexblocks on long waits that makes it resistant to high contention.
queuing_mutex is scalable, fair, non-recursive, and spins in user space. Use it when scalability and fairness are important.
spin_rw_mutex and queuing_rw_mutex are similar to spin_mutex and queuing_mutex, but additionally support reader locks.
rw_mutex is similar to mutex, but additionally support reader locks.
speculative_spin_mutex and speculative_spin_rw_mutex are similar to spin_mutex and spin_rw_mutex, but additionally provide speculative locking on processors that support hardware transaction memory. Speculative locking allows multiple threads acquire the same lock, as long as there are no “conflicts” that may generate different results than non-speculative locking. These mutexes are scalable when work with low conflict rate, i.e. mostly in speculative locking mode.
null_mutex and null_rw_mutex do nothing. They can be useful as template arguments. For example, suppose you are defining a container template and know that some instantiations will be shared by multiple threads and need internal locking, but others will be private to a thread and not need locking. You can define the template to take a Mutex type parameter. The parameter can be one of the real mutex types when locking is necessary, and null_mutex when locking is unnecessary.

Mutex	Scalable	Fair	Recursive	Long Wait	Size
`spin_mutex`	no	no	no	yields	1 byte
`mutex`	✓	no	no	blocks	1 byte
`speculative_spin_mutex`	HW dependent	no	no	yields	2 cache lines
`queuing_mutex`	✓	✓	no	yields	1 word
`spin_rw_mutex`	no	no	no	yields	1 word
`spin_rw_mutex`	✓	no	no	blocks	1 word
`speculative_spin_rw_mutex`	HW dependent	no	no	yields	3 cache lines
`queuing_rw_mutex`	✓	✓	no	yields	1 word
`null_mutex`²	moot	✓	✓	never	empty
`null_rw_mutex`	moot	✓	✓	never	empty

[1]: The yielding is implemented via SwitchToThread() on Microsoft Windows* operating systems and by sched_yield() on other systems.

[2]: Null mutexes are considered fair by oneTBB because they cannot cause starvation. They lack any non-static data members.

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Mutex Flavors