What is a race condition?

Question

When writing multithreaded applications, one of the most common problems experienced is race conditions.

My questions to the community are:

What is the race condition?
How do you detect them?
How do you handle them?
Finally, how do you prevent them from occurring?

Answer 1

A race condition occurs when two or more threads can access shared data and they try to change it at the same time. Because the thread scheduling algorithm can swap between threads at any time, you don't know the order in which the threads will attempt to access the shared data. Therefore, the result of the change in data is dependent on the thread scheduling algorithm, i.e. both threads are "racing" to access/change the data.

Problems often occur when one thread does a "check-then-act" (e.g. "check" if the value is X, then "act" to do something that depends on the value being X) and another thread does something to the value in between the "check" and the "act". E.g:

if (x == 5) // The "Check"
{
   y = x * 2; // The "Act"

   // If another thread changed x in between "if (x == 5)" and "y = x * 2" above,
   // y will not be equal to 10.
}

The point being, y could be 10, or it could be anything, depending on whether another thread changed x in between the check and act. You have no real way of knowing.

In order to prevent race conditions from occurring, you would typically put a lock around the shared data to ensure only one thread can access the data at a time. This would mean something like this:

// Obtain lock for x
if (x == 5)
{
   y = x * 2; // Now, nothing can change x until the lock is released. 
              // Therefore y = 10
}
// release lock for x