The Old New Thing

Interlocked operations don’t solve everything

September 15, 2004 Sep 15, 2004 09/15/04

Raymond Chen

Interlocked operations are a high-performance way of updating DWORD-sized or pointer-sized values in an atomic manner. Note, however, that this doesn't mean that you can avoid the critical section. For example, suppose you have a critical section that protects a variable, and in some other part of the code, you want to update the variable ...