Critical sections better in thread or main program?

I use to use critical section (in c++) to block theads execution whilel accessing shared data, but as to work them must need to wait unti开发者_如何学JAVAl data is not used before blocking, maybe it's better to use them in main or thread. Then if I want my main program to have priority and not be blocked must I use critical sections inside it to block other thread or the contrary ?

---

You seem to have rather a misconception over what critical sections are and how they work.

Speaking generically, a critical section (CS) is a piece of code that needs to run "exclusively" -- i.e., you need to ensure that only one thread is executing that piece of code at any given time.

As the term is used in most environments, a CS is really a mutex -- a mutual exclusion semaphore (aka binary semaphore). It's a data structure (and set of functions) you use to ensure that a section of code gets executed exclusively (rather than referring to the code itself).

In any case, a CS only makes sense at all when/if you have some code that will execute in more than one thread, and you need to ensure that it only ever executes in one thread at any given time. This is typically when you have some shared data that could and would be corrupted if more than one thread tried to manipulate it at one time. When/if that arises, you need to "use" the critical section for every thread that manipulates that data to assure that the shared data isn't corrupted.

Assuring that a particular thread remains responsive is a whole separate question. In most cases, this means using a queue (for one possibility) to allow the thread to "hand off" a task to some other thread quickly, with minimal contention (i.e., instead of using a CS for the duration of processing the data, the CS only lasts long enough to put a data structure into a queue, and some other thread takes the processing from there).

---

You cannot say "I am using critical section in thread A but not in thread B". Critical section is a piece of code that accesses shared resource. When this code is executed from two threads that run in parallel, shared resource might get corrupted so therefore you need to synchronise access to it: you need to use some of synchronisation objects (mutexes, semaphores, events...depending on the platform and API you are using). ThreadA locks the critical section so ThreadB needs to wait till ThreadA releases it.

If you want your main thread to block (wait) less than working thread, set working thread priority to be lower than priority of the main thread.