I can't really devote time to countering the unfounded assertion that every contended mutex must be a bug. It certainly isn't consistent with my experience, but if every problem you've solved could have been parallelized infinitely without increasing lock contention, more power to you.

Good, because that's not what I said. If you're heavily hitting futex convention you do have a performance bug, though. You might be confused with general contention that's being resolved with a spinlock rather than futex wait, though.

> Good, because that's not what I said.

It is literally what you said:

>>> If you have a heavily-contended mutex you already have a major performance bug. If this is the kick in the pants you need to go fix it that's arguably a good thing ;)

> You might be confused with general contention that's being resolved with a spinlock rather than futex wait, though.

I'm not confusing them at all; I'm literally reading exactly what you wrote. You literally said contended mutexes are necessarily bugs (right here^) and that you considered mutexes to include the initial spinlocks ("note that mutex contention does not itself mean immediately falling back to futex - commonly you'll spinloop first"). But maybe you meant to say something else?

I concur with his opinion. Infrequent contention is not a bug; otherwise no mutex is needed. Frequent contention (or heavy contention in his words) is a performance bug.

"Heavily" was not dropped intentionally at all. Add it back to my comments. It changes nothing whatsoever. The incredible opinion that every problem can be necessarily parallelized without eventually resulting in contention (and I license you to freely modify this term with 'light', 'heavy', 'medium-rare', 'salted', 'peppered', or 'grilled at 450F' to your taste) is so fantastically absurd that I cannot believe you are debating it. I definitely don't know how you can justify such an unfounded claim with no evidence and I certainly have no interest in wasting time debating it. As I said earlier: if you never encounter problems that exhibit eventual scalability limits, more power to you.

I mean, the parent's argument is wrong, but isn't that naive. Presumably the argument is a bad (yet still correct) solution would result in lock contention while a better solution would e.g. use a different algorithm that is more parallelizable.