On 7/18/2011 9:51 AM, Klaim - Joël Lamotte wrote:

Hi,

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 15:32, Hartmut Kaiser <hartmut.kaiser@gmail.com> wrote:

- What is your evaluation of the documentation?

Just a minor request so far :

If I remember correctly (and I might be very wrong as my memory is really not clear on this point), the presentation at boostcon started by explaining why lockfree data structures should be used only in last resort or something like that.

Maybe a documentation page with such explainations would help the user know if it there are better solutions for their cases? I read that the main purpose is comunication between threads.

Joël Lamotte

One case where I use a lock-free data structure is with high performance network communications in which the client app receives tremendous amounts of data. The app has a thread dedicated to receiving data and another thread dedicated to processing the data. It uses a fixed size lock-free circular buffer to hold the data. In terms of boost::lockfree, this would be akin to the fifo queue. Using a circular queue prevents memory allocations, but does limit the amount of stored data making it critical that the processing thread reasonably keep up. Having a lock-free data structure definitely helps with performance.

I haven't looked at boost::lockfree yet, but I'm very curious to know how the fifo queue compares. Perhaps adding a circular queue version to lockfree would be beneficial. The implementation is fairly trivial. I don't even use atomic operations for it (at least on Windows). Although perhaps they may be needed for other platforms.

-- 
Bill