Concurrency in Practice
Threads, async and lock-free patterns for services under real load
By Omar El Alaoui
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About the book
What you’re getting into
Concurrency is where confident code goes to embarrass itself. This book takes you past the textbook mutex into the patterns that keep high-throughput services both fast and correct — async runtimes, work queues, backpressure, and the race conditions that only ever show up in production. It's language-agnostic and relentlessly practical about how concurrent systems really behave once the load is real.
After you’ve read it
What you’ll be able to do
- Reason about shared state, ordering and visibility
- Pick between threads, async runtimes and message passing
- Guard shared data without turning locks into bottlenecks
- Apply lock-free patterns where they genuinely pay off
- Design backpressure so overload degrades instead of collapsing
- Parallelise work for throughput with sensible pool sizing
- Reproduce, diagnose and fix races and deadlocks
- Shut services down cleanly under active traffic
Table of contents
- 01
Why Concurrency Bites
- Shared state and the illusion of order
- Latency versus throughput
- A mental model for the book
- 02
Threads, Tasks and Runtimes
- OS threads versus green threads
- Event loops and async/await
- Choosing a model for the job
- 03
Sharing State Safely
- Mutexes and their hidden costs
- Read-write locks and their traps
- When not to share at all
- 04
Lock-Free and Wait-Free Patterns
- Atomics and compare-and-swap
- Lock-free queues and ring buffers
- When lock-free isn't worth it
- 05
Message Passing and Actors
- Channels and mailboxes
- Actor supervision and isolation
- Avoiding accidental shared state
- 06
Backpressure and Flow Control
- Bounded queues as a design tool
- Rate limiting incoming work
- Dropping versus blocking
- 07
Parallelism for Throughput
- Work stealing and scheduling
- Fan-out and fan-in patterns
- Sizing pools to the hardware
- 08
Debugging Races and Deadlocks
- Reproducing the unreproducible
- Detecting deadlocks and livelocks
- Stress and property-based testing
- 09
Concurrency in Production
- Observability for concurrent code
- Graceful shutdown and draining
- A reliability checklist
The full chapter list, exactly as it appears in your PDF.
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