Your program will likely work in 99% of the cases (maybe 99.9999%), but as the opening and locking are two separate steps, it might happen that:
  1. Process A opens lock.txt
  2. Process B opens lock.txt
  3. Process A flocks()
  4. Process B tries to flock().... and fails
So you should really encapsulate your code above in a polling loop that detects locking failures and retries every n seconds on failure.

If you want to be more safe, you should ask yourself: what happens if now_access_the_common_resource() crashes or loops? will the file stay locked forever? how do you detect that the other processes are starving?

My suggestion is: if your program already uses a RDBMS, why not using its own locking features? each and every decent RDBMS already has consistent locking features implemented to make its own basic work.

You could - for example - have a one-row table with a status field that each process tries to update like UPDATE mytable SET status=1 WHERE status=0 LIMIT 1. After each update you check the number of affected rows; it it's 1 you got access to the resource (and atomically locked it), if no row was affected you could not obtain the access, so you sleep() random seconds and try again. To release the resource you simply UPDATE mytable SET status = 0 WHERE table_id = 123.

The nice part of this approach is that it works not only for one resource but for limited sets like resource pools too: just add ten lines to the table, and the first ten processes will be allowed to pass, the eleventh will have to wait and so on.

In reply to Re: Ways to sequence calls from multiple processes by l3nz
in thread Ways to sequence calls from multiple processes by johnnywang

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