When using a mutex it is threadsafe, but does it run in parellel?

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Hopefully I ask this right... but then it is about threading.
We have an older version (9.08) of the Ghostscript dll that was compiled with the thread safe flag. Without it, all my tests up to version 9.20 have shown that of 10 simultaneous threads, about 4 tend to fail to convert PDF to PostScript.
One of our developers has wrapped version 9.51 (64 bit... cool) in a mutex semaphore. Now if I understand correctly, that would make it thread safe, but only by making sure that only one document was processed by the dll at a time so processing would be sequential, not parallel. Is that correct?

What I have tried:

I have a test harness, so I guess I could do a performance test on it.

Posted 17-Mar-20 7:31am

Michael Breeden

Updated 17-Mar-20 7:42am

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Solution 2

Here is some information from the writer of C# in a Nutshell: Threading in C# - Part 2 - Basic Synchronization[^]
So a Mutex, if implemented correctly, is not only thread-safe but also works system wide for applications.

Posted 17-Mar-20 7:43am

RickZeeland

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Richard MacCutchan · Accepted Answer · 2020-03-17T07:42:00

Solution 1

Assuming the entire process is blocked by the semaphore, then your assumption is correct. If the latest version(s) of Ghostscript are not thread safe then there is not much you can do. You could try running the conversions as separate processes, if that is possible.

Posted 17-Mar-20 7:42am

Richard MacCutchan