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concurrency

Producer-Consumer Problem

The producer-consumer problem involves two types of processes sharing a fixed-size buffer: producers add items to the buffer and consumers remove them. The challenge is coordinating access so producers block when the buffer is full and consumers block when it is empty. This pattern decouples data generation from data processing, enabling each side to work at its own pace. It is one of the most common concurrency patterns in real-world systems.

Use Cases

  • Message queues decoupling microservice communication
  • Log aggregation where producers emit log entries and consumers write to storage
  • Task scheduling where a job queue feeds worker threads
  • Streaming data pipelines with bounded backpressure

Visualization

INITIALBounded Queue(3)ProduceridleConsumeridle
Speed:1x
A producer generates items. A consumer processes them. A bounded queue (size 3) sits between them.Step 1 / 7

Implementation

Output

Click "Run Code" to see output...