dasqueel / Concurrency-flock

Concurrency with flock

Bankers and Concurrency

This is an assignment to experiment with concurrency and some of the issues that arise with it.

Why Do I Care?

In all kinds of development, web included, multiple processes often have access to the same resources. Obscure and hard-to-find (read "expensive") bugs can occur when multiple processes attempt to access the same resources at the same time.

It is always a good idea to think to yourself, what happens when two of these processes run at once? Anything bad?

Concurrency

What is concurrency? In a nutshell, we want to run a number of processes at the same time with access to shared resources. And we want these processes not to step on each-other's toes.

Imagine that after the Mount Everest expedition, there was an expedition journal that needed to be filled out with the experiences of all expedition members. Each member is given a pen, the journal is opened, and they all begin writing on the same page at the same time.

Everyone scribbles on top of everyone else. It's not working.

So the expedition gives it a think, and decides to only allow one person to write in the journal at a time. Problem solved. Publishers are definitely interested. Someone smells movie contract.

Of course, all the other members of the expedition are sitting around doing nothing while they wait their turn. Maybe there is room for improvement... This is the kind of problem computer scientists like to solve.

Money, Money, Money

We're going to write code that simulates a number of processes trying to withdraw money from a bank account at the same time.

The process for withdrawing money is simple:

1. Open the file containing the balance.
2. Read the current balance.
3. Try to withdraw some amount of cash.
   • If the amount to withdraw is less than (or equal to) the current balance:
     • Subtract that amount from the current balance.
     • Write the new balance to the file.
   • If the amount to withdraw is greater than the current balance:
     • Print an error and do not modify the balance.
4. Close the file containing the balance.

This works fine for any one processes trying to withdraw money in isolation.

Assignment

Implement code to safely withdraw money from a bank account. (A simulated bank account, that is. Don't get your hopes up.)

1. Short answer: How can things go wrong if two processes attempt the above plan at the same time? Is there more than one way things can go wrong?

2. Study and understand the skeleton code in the src/ directory.

   Short answer: what do each of the arguments to open() mean?

3. Take the skeleton code in the src/ directory and implement the pieces marked. Run it.

   Short answer: What happens? Do things go as planned and look sensible? What do you speculate is happening?

4. Add calls to flock() to capture and release an exclusive lock on the file before reading and changing the data.

   The results of the run should now make sense.

5. Short answer: Why is it working? How has adding locks fixed the problems you noted in question 1? How is overall performance of the application affected?

Stretch Goals

• Make some processes deposit money while others withdraw money.

• Have some processes simply check the balance without changing it. Do you need to lock? If so, do you need to use LOCK_EX? If not, what are the advantages of your approach?