I am using a queue to communicate between threads. I have one reader and multiple writer threads. My question is do I need to lock the queue every time when I use push/front/pop from the queue for the reader? Can I do something like the following:
//reader threads
getLock();
get the number of elements from the queue
releaseLock();
int i = 0;
while( i < numOfElements){
queue.front();
queue.pop();
i++
}
The idea is that I want to reduce the granularity of the locked code and since the writer thread would only write to the back of the queue and there is only a single reader thread. As long as I get the number of elements, then I could get the elements from the queue OR do I need to enclose the front() and pop() in the lock as well?