[Boost-users] Locking mechanisms other than scoped_lock

From: Leon Mergen (leon_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-03-19 13:29:17

Hello,

I'm currently trying to achieve the following:

A series of threads handle jobs (threads A). Of each of these jobs, in
the end, a statistics object is placed in a container. This container
will later be read-from by another thread (thread B), dedicated to
continuously reading statistics data from other threads, and parse those
statistics.

Now, since it is very well possible a thread handles at least 1,000 jobs
before statistics data is actually read from, I want it to hold a mutex
lock to the data at all time. The class also has an internal volatile
boolean, which flags whether another thread (thread B) wants to read
from the container. If so, the writing thread (threads A) releases the
lock, after which thread B will pick up the lock and write the data and
resets the boolean flag. After releasing the lock, threads A will
immediately try to re-acquire the lock.

However, as far as I can see, for this approach, a scoped_lock will not
be the most fantastic solution ? Or am I missing something really
crucial about the scoped_lock being able to hold a lock outside a
certain scope ? :)

Thanks in advance for any suggestions about a locking type... :)

Regards,

Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com/