Multithreading Glossary

Browse 4 multithreading terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

4 Multithreading Terms

Lock: A synchronization primitive that enforces mutual exclusion — only one thread can hold the lock at a time, and all other threads that attempt to acquire it will...
Lock Contention: A performance bottleneck that occurs when multiple threads frequently compete for the same lock, causing them to block and wait instead of doing useful work....
Synchronization: The coordination of concurrent threads, processes, or distributed nodes to ensure correct ordering of operations and safe access to shared resources —...
Synchronization Primitive: A low-level building block — such as a mutex, semaphore, spinlock, condition variable, or atomic operation — provided by the OS or language runtime to...