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Mean valueMean valuePosted Feb 3, 2006 3:28 UTC (Fri) by obobo (guest, #684)In reply to: Mean value by madscientist Parent article: The search for fast, scalable counters
In general, you can run into problems where the counter is being incremented as it is being read. Say you're using a (mythical) 8-bit architecture, and the 16-bit counter value is being incremented from 0x00ff to 0x0100. The intermediate state, as the counter is being updated, will be 0x0000 (or perhaps 0x01ff) because only 8 bits are being written at a time. Much worse than the off-by-one situation that I think you were imagining. And worse still if it is a 64 bit counter on a 32 bit system...
Caveat- I don't know anything the specific types mentioned in the article (local_t in particular) so this particular problem might not be an issue there depending on how the atomicity of it works.
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Mean value Posted Feb 3, 2006 10:39 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] So, just stick to the size native to the architecture. On 32-bit machines, never use more than 32 bits for the intermediate values; if you happen to be on a Z80 (not so mythical 8-bit architecture) use a max value of 255 for them.Incrementing a 32-bit register on a 32-bit architecture is an atomic operation even on multi-processor systems, right?
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