Pessimistic Locking

Kind: pattern

Layer: Atomic Boundary

Record: architecture:pessimistic-locking

Severity: contextual

Scope: persistence, critical section

Canonical: Ontology

A design pattern that locks a record before reading it for update, so other writers wait until the transaction ends.

Listed in Architecture principles, after Optimistic Locking and before State Isolation.

Requires

• Lock Ownership

Reinforces

• Isolation

Enables

• Strong Conflict Prevention

In tension with

• Deadlock Freedom
• Latency
• Lock-Free Throughput

Tensions

• Pessimistic Locking / Deadlock Freedom
• Pessimistic Locking / Latency
• Pessimistic Locking / Lock-Free Throughput

Violated by

• Blind Overwrite

Refactored by

• Apply Concurrency Control

Severity

• contextual

Category

• Transactions / State / Concurrency

Refactors

• Lost Update
• Concurrency Control

Linked from

• Verify the verifier
• Anti-patterns
• Scalability / Performance / Optimization
• Transactions / State / Concurrency
• Transactions / State / Concurrency
• Severity levels
• The resolutions