IO Service per core design with singleton

Question

I'am developing currently game server, and currently I have one design problem.

Game server have World class (it's singleton) and when i changed from single I/O service to I/O service per core, I think i should use mutex in my World class. Because packet handler from client sometimes perform operations using World's functions.

Is there way to avoid mutex in that singleton ?

Answer 1

You can use the Active Object pattern.

So make the World implementation an active object, in effect running all operations on its own thread.

A sample of the Active Object pattern with Boost Asio is here: boost::asio and Active Object

Whether it is (performance-wise) appropriate for you to make World an active object, I cannot tell. I have a feeling you should /simply/ not access World from many threads, instead only running computation-intensive stuff in the background that you don't need locks to coordinate, or where the locking overhead isn't significant.

In my comment here I showed an alternative approach to dispatching jobs with a lock-free queue implementation.