Race Condition
A race condition is a software bug that occurs when the behavior of a program or system changes upon relative timing or interleaving of multiple concurrent operations. Race condition occurs when one output is dependent on the sequence in another production. Or else we can say the timing of uncontrolled events. This can lead to unexpected results and bugs that we cannot reproduce.
Here’s an example to illustrate that:
Let’s say you have a program with two threads; ThreadA and ThreadB.
Thread A reads the value of “count” as 5, increases the value of “count” by 1, and writes the new value back to the “count” variable . Whereas, Thread B also does the same thing as Thread A. If Thread A and Thread B execute concurrently, a race condition may occur. Here’s a possible interleaving of their operations: Thread A and Thread B reads “count” as 5, increment “count” to 6, and writes 6 back to “count”.
In this scenario, both threads reads the initial value of 5, increment it to 6, and write back the same value. As a result the final value of “count” should be 6. However due to the race condition, the final value may also end up being 7 if the interleaving of the operations is different.
Race conditions can lead to various issues, such as data corruption, crashes, deadlocks, or incorrect program behavior. To prevent race conditions, proper synchronization mechanisms like locks, semaphores, or atomic operations need to be employed to coordinate access to shared resources and ensure consistency.
Happy Learning, Happy Hacking.
