Chapter 15: Multithreaded Deadlocks

Overview

Without a doubt, the hardest problems to solve in modern software development are multithreaded deadlocks. Even if you think you planned for every situation, your multithreaded application can stop dead when you least expect it. The biggest obstacle to debugging multithreaded deadlocks is that by the time your application is deadlocked, it's almost too late to start debugging.

In this chapter, I'll go over some tricks and techniques that have worked for me when I've done multithreaded programming. I'll also present a utility I wrote, DeadlockDetection, that lets you see the flow of events that led up to your deadlock, which is about the only evidence you'll have to help you track down what went wrong and figure out how to avoid the same deadlock in the future. The information in this chapter and the DeadlockDetection utility will help you avoid the minefield of multithreaded deadlocks.