Concurrency in Golang and the importance of using locks

Have this innocent looking code in Golang:

func incrementWithoutLocking() int {
    counter := 0

    incrementCounter := func(done chan bool) {
        for i := 0; i < 1000000; i++ {
            counter++
        }

        done <- true
    }

    // create a channel to synchronize when both goroutines are finished
    done := make(chan bool)

    // run two goroutines in parallel, both incrementing the shared counter
    go incrementCounter(done)
    go incrementCounter(done)

    // wait for both to finish
    <-done
    <-done

    return counter
}

Also note, how easy it is to implement concurrency/parallelism (though they are not the same thing) in Golang! :)

Now, observing return values:

incrementWithoutLocking run #0 = 1104552
incrementWithoutLocking run #1 = 1012191
incrementWithoutLocking run #2 = 1033641
incrementWithoutLocking run #3 = 1096998
incrementWithoutLocking run #4 = 1031533

2 * 1 000 000 should be 2 000 000 and the return values are seemingly random, so something fishy is going on!

Clearly the integer incrementing (counter++) does not get executed on the processor level as an atomic instruction, but rather it is read-and-written by the processor, and when two threads are simultaneously doing it, something like this happens:

thread A: read counter from RAM, value= 10
thread A: increment by one, 10 + 1 = 11
thread B: read counter from RAM, value= 10
thread A: store 11 in RAM
thread B: increment by one, 10 + 1 = 11  (<-- this should have been 11 + 1 = 12)
thread B: store 11 in RAM

This is called a race condition. This is the simplest and most obvious form of it, since we can see the counter numbers acting seemingly random and they are obviously incorrect.

Sadly, in real life race conditions are much easier to accidentally introduce and really hard to debug.

When we cannot avoid writing code that uses shared mutable state, we need to use locks, meaning that when we are about to do something that changes the mutable state (including the read), we surround it with a lock that guarantees that nobody else executes the same computation at the same time as we do.

Various locking primitives are found in Golang’s sync package. The simplest one of them being Mutex (“mutual exclusion”).

So, our offending code was:

counter := 0

incrementCounter := func(done chan bool) {
    for i := 0; i < 1000000; i++ {
        counter++
    }

    done <- true
}

Now, let’s use a lock by doing these changes:

counter := 0
counterLock := sync.Mutex{}

incrementCounter := func(done chan bool) {
    for i := 0; i < 1000000; i++ {
        counterLock.Lock()
        counter++
        counterLock.Unlock()
    }

    done <- true
}

And by running the code again:

incrementWithLocking run #0 = 2000000
incrementWithLocking run #1 = 2000000
incrementWithLocking run #2 = 2000000
incrementWithLocking run #3 = 2000000
incrementWithLocking run #4 = 2000000

=> Great success. And it’s really rather simple to use!

Full code is here:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "sync"
)

func incrementWithoutLocking() int {
    counter := 0

    incrementCounter := func(done chan bool) {
        for i := 0; i < 1000000; i++ {
            counter++
        }

        done <- true
    }

    // create a channel to synchronize when both goroutines are finished
    done := make(chan bool)

    go incrementCounter(done)
    go incrementCounter(done)

    <-done
    <-done

    return counter
}

func incrementWithLocking() int {
    counter := 0
    counterLock := sync.Mutex{}

    incrementCounter := func(done chan bool) {
        for i := 0; i < 1000000; i++ {
            counterLock.Lock()
            counter++
            counterLock.Unlock()
        }

        done <- true
    }

    // create a channel to synchronize when both goroutines are finished
    done := make(chan bool)

    go incrementCounter(done)
    go incrementCounter(done)

    <-done
    <-done

    return counter
}

func main() {
    for i := 0; i < 5; i++ {
        fmt.Printf("incrementWithoutLocking run #%d = %d\n", i, incrementWithoutLocking())
    }

    for i := 0; i < 5; i++ {
        fmt.Printf("incrementWithLocking run #%d = %d\n", i, incrementWithLocking())
    }
}