ZeroMQ - lock free algorithms

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Lock-free algorithms:

• Lock-free algorithms have been in vogue lately. They are simple mechanisms for inter-thread communication that don't rely on the kernel-provided synchronisation primitives, such as mutexes or semaphores; rather, they do the synchronisation using atomic CPU operations, such as atomic compare-and-swap (CAS). It should be understood that they are not literally lock-free—instead, locking is done behind the scenes on the hardware level.
  
• Each queue has exactly one writer thread and exactly one reader thread. If there's a need for 1-to-N communication, multiple queues are created (Figure 24.8). Given that this way the queue doesn't have to take care of synchronising the writers (there's only one writer) or readers (there's only one reader) it can be implemented in an extra-efficient way.
  
• While lock-free algorithms were more efficient than classic mutex-based algorithms, atomic CPU operations are still rather expensive (especially when there's contention between CPU cores) and doing an atomic operation for each message written and/or each message read was slower than we were willing to accept.
  
• Receiving a packet is an atomic event; you cannot get half of it. This atomic event results in the need to write 10 messages to the lock-free queue. There's not much point in doing an atomic operation for each message. Instead, you can accumulate the messages in a "pre-write" portion of the queue that's accessed solely by the writer thread, and then flush it using a single atomic operation.