> hlovatt wrote:
> > This is a very interesting discussion and reveals a lot about the
> > difficulties of programming for multiple cores.

> > I was trying to understand what was going on and was 'messing about'
> > with the code and I noticed that almost any change I made slowed the
> > code down considerably - more than the 1 or 2 thread options in Java 6
> > does. Therefore I am not sure how realistic the code is. If the code
> > did more than simply increment a variable or two than the problem
> > might go away (because contention would be less and because the
> > uncontested operations would be a bigger percentage).

> > Going back to the original code. If it is OK to miss a few increments
> > (hence non-volitile statics) then the following should be OK:

> Yeah, clever, and basically the same as the eventual fix I had for JRuby
> since it gives each thread its own counter. I think the primary rule
> here is that don't expect any sort of unsynchronized, uncontrolled
> updates to the same shared resource to either behave the way you want or
> perform the way you want.

> - Charlie