Memory That is Accessed Through a
Pointer
In the topic Pointer Dereferences, we saw that there
are techniques for dealing with incidental sharing of pointer-accessed storage
in particular cases.
In general, to deal with sharing problems at indirect
references you have to really understand what your program is doing. You cannot
just do a text search for all the uses of a shared location and apply some
transformation mechanically.
Although you may not know which memory location is
being accessed by an indirect reference, you may be able to tell that a set of
indirect references using the same pointer value implement an independent
update pattern. The process for synchronizing independent updates of indirect
references is the same as for variables. The only special concern is that you
need to use the same lock for all data accesses that might be accessing the
same memory locations. Using the same lock in more places means that your tasks
will spend more time waiting for it.
Finally, your design may have tasks working on
separate parts of a larger data structure. If you find sharing problems, it may
be that the parts are not as independent as designed. In that case, you are
likely to get the best results by disentangling the data structures to resolve
the sharing problems.