Ruby and mutexes

Question

I have a multi-threaded application. I have three shared resources. Different threads will call those resources simultaneously. I need to have a mutex for that. Will one mutex be enough, or should I create a mutex for every resource? Will it speed up when using many mutexes?

Answer 1

If the resources are independent of eachother, there is no reason to guard them all with a single Mutex. You will be starving other threads of access to resources that they could safely use.

Use one Mutex per resource if possible.

wrt performance - Threads accessing the shared resources are more likely to perform well if the resources are independently guarded as opposed to having a single, shared Mutex - but it depends on many more factors than just this.