zakirkun Atomicity Violation
Overview
Atomicity violations occur when a sequence of operations that must execute as a unit can be interleaved by other threads. Unlike simple counter races, these involve multi-step operations where the intermediate state is invalid.
Example: Check-then-act on user balance, file existence, or session state.
Remediation
- Wrap multi-step operations in mutex/lock
- Use database transactions for multi-step data operations
- Use compare-and-swap (CAS) operations for lock-free atomic sequences