New in Symfony 5.2: Shared locks

October 12, 2020 Javier Eguiluz

Contributed by
Jérémy Derussé
in #37752.

In computer science, the readers–writers problems deal with situations in which many concurrent threads of execution try to access the same shared resource at one time.

A readers–writer lock is a synchronization primitive that solves one of those problems. It allows concurrent access for read-only operations, while write operations require exclusive access. This means that multiple threads can read the data in parallel but an exclusive lock is needed for writing or modifying data.

In Symfony 5.2 we’ve added support for them thanks to shared locks. When the lock store implements the new SharedLockStoreInterface, you can call the acquireRead() method to get a read-only lock, while the existing acquire() method gets a write lock:

$lock = $factory->createLock('user'.$user->id);
if ($lock->acquireRead()) {
    // ...
}

Read the new docs about shared locks to learn all about them.

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New in Symfony 5.2: Shared locks symfony.com/blog/new-in-symfony-5-2-shared-locks

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Comments

Ivan Kurnosov said on Oct 22, 2020 at 01:29 #1

I think documentation (and probably this article too) should include explanation what bias is implemented: towards readers or towards writers.

Javier Eguiluz Certified said on Oct 22, 2020 at 09:59 #2

@Ivan good question! We're clarifying this in the docs: https://github.com/symfony/symfony-docs/pull/14460