26.10 Summary

The creation of a new thread is normally faster than the creation of a new process with fork. This alone can be an advantage in heavily used network servers. Threads programming, however, is a new paradigm that requires more discipline.

All threads in a process share global variables and descriptors, allowing this information to be shared between different threads. But this sharing introduces synchronization problems and the Pthread synchronization primitives that we must use are mutexes and condition variables. Synchronization of shared data is a required part of almost every threaded application.

When writing functions that can be called by threaded applications, these functions must be thread-safe. Thread-specific data is one technique that helps with this, and we showed an example with our readline function.

We return to the threads model in Chapter 30 with another server design in which the server creates a pool of threads when it starts. An available thread from this pool handles the next client request.