Underestimating concurrency issues

Feb 22, 2008 at 5:00 am · Filed under concurrency and tagged: concurrency, consistency

More often than you can imagine, I have seen systems where the problems of concurrency were severely underestimated. Even people that I considered quite intelligent, when I was commenting about the lack of a concurrency control, argued: But chances are quite low.

Or even worst: a kind of optimistic locking was implemented, but the check of the time-stamp was done through a SELECT statement previous to the update without locking the row. Again, the argument was it is really improbable to get an update in between.

The problem is simple, low probability does not mean impossible and when this happens, it is specially tricky to find the reason for an error in a system that was running without any problem for a long time.

Fixing a bug has two parts: detection and correction. From these two steps, the first one is the most difficult and concurrency problems are (precisely, because of their low probability) very hard to reproduce.

Thinking that it doesn’t worth the effort to solve them, due to the low-probability, is like playing Russian roulette with a single bullet.

Hibernate now makes everything easier. Be aware however, that EntityManager is not thread-safe.

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