First, we want to take a little detour to discuss the "critical section" issue. Let's start with a resource-locking scheme. A schematic representation of a proper locking technique is as follows:

  1. Lock a resource

    <critical section starts>

  2. Do something with the resource

    <critical section ends>

  3. Unlock the resource

If the locking is exclusive, only one process can hold the resource at any given time, which means that all the other processes will have to wait. The code between the locking and unlocking functions cannot be interrupted and can therefore become a service bottleneck. That's why this code section is called critical. Its execution time should be as short as possible.

Even if you use a shared locking scheme, in which many processes are allowed to concurrently access the resource, it's still important to keep the critical section as short as possible, in case a process requires an exclusive lock.

Example 6-30 uses a shared lock but has a poorly designed critical section.

Example 6-30. critical_section_sh.pl

use Fcntl qw(:flock);
use Symbol;

my $fh = gensym;
open $fh, "/tmp/foo" or die $!;

# start critical section
flock $fh, LOCK_SH;  # shared lock, appropriate for reading
seek $fh, 0, 0;
my @lines = <$fh>;
for (@lines) {
    print if /foo/;
}
close $fh; # close unlocks the file
# end critical section

The code opens the file for reading, locks and rewinds it to the beginning, reads all the lines from the file, and prints out the lines that contain the string "foo".

The gensym( ) function imported by the Symbol module creates an anonymous glob data structure and returns a reference to it. Such a glob reference can be used as a file or directory handle. Therefore, it allows lexically scoped variables to be used as filehandles.

Fcntl imports file-locking symbols, such as LOCK_SH, LOCK_EX, and others with the :flock group tag, into the script's namespace. Refer to the Fcntl manpage for more information about these symbols.

If the file being read is big, it will take a relatively long time for this code to complete printing out the lines. During this time, the file remains open and locked with a shared lock. While other processes may access this file for reading, any process that wants to modify the file (which requires an exclusive lock) will be blocked waiting for this section to complete.

We can optimize the critical section as follows. Once the file has been read, we have all the information we need from it. To make the example simpler, we've chosen to just print out the matching lines. In reality, the code might be much longer.

We don't need the file to be open while the loop executes, because we don't access it inside the loop. Closing the file before we start the loop will allow other processes to obtain exclusive access to the file if they need it, instead of being blocked for no reason.

Example 6-31 is an improved version of the previous example, in which we only read the contents of the file during the critical section and process it afterward, without creating a possible bottleneck.

Example 6-31. critical_section_sh2.pl

use Fcntl qw(:flock);
use Symbol;

my $fh = gensym;
open $fh, "/tmp/foo" or die $!;

# start critical section
flock $fh, LOCK_SH;
seek $fh, 0, 0;
my @lines = <$fh>;
close $fh; # close unlocks the file
# end critical section

for (@lines) {
    print if /foo/;
}

Example 6-32 is a similar example that uses an exclusive lock. The script reads in a file and writes it back, prepending a number of new text lines to the head of the file.

Example 6-32. critical_section_ex.pl

use Fcntl qw(:flock);
use Symbol;

my $fh = gensym;
open $fh, "+>>/tmp/foo" or die $!;

# start critical section
flock $fh, LOCK_EX;
seek $fh, 0, 0;
my @add_lines =
  (
   qq{Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists,\n},
   qq{should be found on this system using 'man perl' or\n},
   qq{'perldoc perl'. If you have access to the Internet, point\n},
   qq{your browser at http://www.perl.com/, the Perl Home Page.\n},
  );

my @lines = (@add_lines, <$fh>);
seek $fh, 0, 0;
truncate $fh, 0;
print $fh @lines;
close $fh; # close unlocks the file
# end critical section

Since we want to read the file, modify it, and write it back without anyone else changing it in between, we open it for reading and writing with the help of "+>>" and lock it with an exclusive lock. You cannot safely accomplish this task by opening the file first for reading and then reopening it for writing, since another process might change the file between the two events. (You could get away with "+<" as well; please refer to the perlfunc manpage for more information about the open( ) function.)

Next, the code prepares the lines of text it wants to prepend to the head of the file and assigns them and the content of the file to the @lines array. Now we have our data ready to be written back to the file, so we seek( ) to the start of the file and truncate( ) it to zero size. Truncating is necessary when there's a chance the file might shrink. In our example, the file always grows, so in this case there is actually no need to truncate it; however, it's good practice to always use truncate( ), as you never know what changes your code might undergo in the future, and truncate( ) doesn't significantly affect performance.

Finally, we write the data back to the file and close it, which unlocks it as well.

Did you notice that we created the text lines to be prepended as close to the place of usage as possible? This complies with good "locality of code" style, but it makes the critical section longer. In cases like this, you should sacrifice style in order to make the critical section as short as possible. An improved version of this script with a shorter critical section is shown in Example 6-33.

Example 6-33. critical_section_ex2.pl

use Fcntl qw(:flock);
use Symbol;

my @lines =
  (
   qq{Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists,\n},
   qq{should be found on this system using 'man perl' or\n},
   qq{'perldoc perl'. If you have access to the Internet, point\n},
   qq{your browser at http://www.perl.com/, the Perl Home Page.\n},
  );

my $fh = gensym;
open $fh, "+>>/tmp/foo" or die $!;

# start critical section
flock $fh, LOCK_EX;
seek $fh, 0, 0;
push @lines, <$fh>;

seek $fh, 0, 0;
truncate $fh, 0;
print $fh @lines;
close $fh; # close unlocks the file
# end critical section

There are two important differences. First, we prepared the text lines to be prepended before the file is locked. Second, rather than creating a new array and copying lines from one array to another, we appended the file directly to the@lines array.