CPP Concurrency & Multithreading 2

Question 1

What is thread starvation?

Accepted Answer

A thread that is perpetually denied CPU time because higher-priority threads always preempt it

Answer

Thread starvation happens when a thread never gets scheduled because other threads or high-priority tasks continuously consume CPU time.

Question 2

What is an atomic operation in concurrent programming?

Accepted Answer

An operation that completes entirely without interruption, appearing instantaneous to other threads

Answer

Atomic operations are indivisible from other threads' perspectives, preventing partial updates that could cause race conditions.

Question 3

What is the producer-consumer pattern?

Accepted Answer

A concurrency pattern where producers add work to a shared queue and consumers process items from it

Answer

The producer-consumer pattern decouples work generation from processing using a thread-safe buffer, enabling independent scaling of each side.

Question 4

What is thread-local storage (TLS)?

Accepted Answer

A mechanism providing each thread with its own private copy of a variable

Answer

Thread-local storage gives each thread its own instance of a variable, eliminating the need for synchronization on that data.

Question 5

What is lock-free programming?

Accepted Answer

Designing concurrent algorithms that use atomic CPU operations instead of mutexes to avoid blocking threads

Answer

Lock-free algorithms use atomic operations (like CAS) to coordinate threads without ever blocking, avoiding deadlock and reducing contention.

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