Cached Monitors

This chapter describes the functions you use when you work with cached monitors. Unlike a plain monitor, a cached monitor is associated with the address of a protected object, and the association is maintained only while the protection is needed. This arrangement allows a cached monitor to be associated with another object without preallocating a monitor for all objects. A hash table is used to quickly map addresses to their respective monitors. The system automatically enlarges the hash table as needed.

Important

Cached monitors are slower to use than their uncached counterparts.

See Monitors for information about uncached monitors.

Cached Monitors Functions

Cached monitors allow the client to associate monitoring protection and state change synchronization in a lazy fashion. The monitoring capability is associated with the protected object only during the time it is required, allowing the monitor object to be reused. This additional flexibility comes at the cost of a small loss in performance.

• PR_CEnterMonitor enters the lock associated with a cached monitor.
• PR_CExitMonitor decrements the entry count associated with a cached monitor.
• PR_CWait waits for a notification that a monitor's state has changed.
• PR_CNotify notifies a thread waiting for a change in the state of monitored data.
• PR_CNotifyAll notifies all the threads waiting for a change in the state of monitored data.