#605 – The Causes of Problems With Reading/Writing Shared Data from Multiple Threads

When you read data from one thread but write the data from a different thread, you can run into a problem where the thread reading the data will read stale/incorrect data.

The problem happens when the compiler, the runtime environment (e.g. JIT compiler) or the hardware optimizes the code in such a way that a thread ends up reading stale data and doesn’t have access to newer data written by a different thread.  As part of standard optimization techniques, a compiler may change the order of instructions being executed or it may choose to store a data value in a local register for efficiency.  When the latter occurs, one thread effectively ends up working with a different copy of the data.

To avoid these problems, you can do one of two things:

• Protect access to the shared data using sychronization techniques
• Use the volatile keyword for shared data fields