Hi All,

I am going through the semaphore concept and have a doubt regarding the same and hope to get a resolution here.

I have a file which has a number of records.
I want to write an application (in C) which will be able to do concurrent read/write on these records.

Of what I have understood about semaphores, I know that a process can obtain a lock on the critical section of code, read/write into records, then release the lock so the other processes waiting to access the data can obtain a lock.

I am confused and tend to think that "Wouldn't this concept lead to a more serious problem?" as another process, actually wanting to read/write a different record on the same file has to wait for the lock to get released by the process which has obtained the lock. If this is the case, think of a situation where we have a large number of processes (say, more than 1000) wanting to do a read/write on same/different records. Wouldn't this concept slow down the application?

Please let me know if I have misunderstood the concept and throw some light on this...

Regards
maverix