Producer–consumer problem

Common card · No. 454100

In computing, the producer-consumer problem (also known as the bounded-buffer problem) is a family of problems described by Edsger W. Dijkstra since 1965. Dijkstra found the solution for the producer-consumer problem as he worked as a consultant for the Electrologica X1 and X8 computers: "The first use of producer-consumer was partly software, partly hardware: The component taking care of the information transport between store and peripheral was called 'a channel' ... Synchronization was controlled by two counting semaphores in what we now know as the producer/consumer arrangement: the one semaphore indicating the length of the queue, was incremented (in a V) by the CPU and decremented (in a P) by the channel, the other one, counting the number of unacknowledged completions, was incremented by the channel and decremented by the CPU. [The second semaphore being positive would raise the corresponding interrupt flag.]" Dijkstra wrote about the unbounded buffer case: "We consider two processes...

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