What are the best practices for threading in Ruby?

What are the best practices for threading in Ruby?

When using threading in Ruby, it's important to keep a few best practices in mind: 1. Use the Thread class for creating threads. 2. Avoid shared mutable state to prevent race conditions. 3. Use Mutex for synchronizing access to shared resources. 4. Keep threads lightweight and avoid long-running threads.

Can you explain why avoiding shared mutable state is important?

Avoiding shared mutable state is crucial because it helps prevent race conditions, where multiple threads access and modify shared data simultaneously, leading to unpredictable behavior and bugs.

What is a Mutex and how do I use it?

A Mutex (Mutual Exclusion) is a synchronization primitive that ensures that only one thread can access a resource at a time. You can use it by creating a Mutex object and wrapping the code that accesses shared resources in a mutex.synchronize block.

Are there any performance considerations I should be aware of?

Yes, threading can introduce overhead due to context switching and synchronization. It's important to balance the number of threads with the workload and consider using thread pools for better performance.