Mark Sizer wrote:
Generically, the difference between critical sections and mutexes is immense. In terms of implementation, one never knows.
A critical section blocks EVERYTHING else in the process. A mutex only blocks things that are waiting on that particular mutex.
Are you absolutely serious/sure about that? I've been using critical sections becauase I couldn't find a reason to use mutexes. So far I've only run my program on single processor machines (where it probably doesn't matter), but I'd hate to think I would have a huge amount of contention on multiprocessor machines. I can see how crit secs can be faster on a single CPU machine with those semantics, because when you schedule the process, you just decide to only schedule that thread. And on a single CPU just setting a flag should work and be safe to do. Jason