Thread Synchronisation 101

Question

Previously I\'ve written some very simple multithreaded code, and I\'ve always been aware that at any time there could be a context switch right in the middle of what I\'m doing

Answer 1

Questions 3: CRITICAL_SECTIONs and Mutexes work, pretty much, the same way. A Win32 mutex is a kernel object, so it can be shared between processes, and waited on with WaitForMultipleObjects, which you can't do with a CRITICAL_SECTION. On the other hand, a CRITICAL_SECTION is lighter-weight and therefore faster. But the logic of the code should be unaffected by which you use.

You also commented that "there is no need for a critical section for each variable you want to protect, if you're in a critical section then nothing else can interrupt you." This is true, but the tradeoff is that accesses to any of the variables would need you to hold that lock. If the variables can meaningfully be updated independently, you are losing an opportunity for parallelising those operations. (Since these are members of the same object, though, I would think hard before concluding that they can really be accessed independently of each other.)