Re: [Boost-Users] Threads and Smart Ptrs

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-02-15 14:31:48

From: "Colin Fox" <cfox_at_[hidden]>
> Greetings, everyone.
>
> I'm currently having some trouble with a heavily multithreaded app which
> uses objects shared between threads via smart pointers.
>
> It's a multi-user application, where each user has a thread, and when
> one user sends a message to another (or broadcasts to all), a message
> object is created, and a smart pointer to that message is put into a
> queue for each thread.
>
> I'm using pthread_mutex for locking the queues for each thread.
>
> This program will sometimes work flawlessly for hours, and other times
> it will die within moments of starting. Pretty much every time it dies,
> it's because the message object has been freed while there are still
> smart pointers pointing to it.
>
> I know that the recent version of the smart pointer library was supposed
> to have added thread-safety to it, but I'm wondering if anyone else is
> having similar troubles.
>
> I'm using gcc 3.0.3 on Linux, and boost 1.27.

Can you simplify the program to the bare minimum that still has the problem?

Also, does the CVS version of shared_ptr work? (It now uses a pthread_mutex
on Linux and not atomic intructions.)