Why is Windows still tinkering with critical sections? – The Old New Thing
18 hours ago
- #Windows
- #Performance
- #CriticalSections
- Adrian (Silent/CookiePLMonster) investigated a 20-year-old bug in GTA San Andreas appearing in Windows 11 24H2.
- Critical sections in Windows are still being optimized for performance, despite being a mature feature.
- Synchronization objects were made unfair to prevent lock convoys, and critical sections were optimized to reduce memory footprint.
- Non-paged pool usage was minimized to avoid performance and reliability issues in large-scale computing.
- Recent changes to critical sections include priority inversion detection and mitigation, with optimizations moving more work to user mode.
- Critical sections continue to evolve to handle modern computing demands, such as higher concurrency and performance.