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Abstract

A method, computer program product, and data structure for reducing the contention for a global lock that impairs system efficiency. An object is assigned or has thereon a positive reference count and a negative reference count. Upon creation, the positive reference count is incremented to indicate creation and the object is placed in a global data structure. When a process thread or other stream of executable instructions initially accesses the data object, the global lock is acquired and the positive reference count incremented to indicate the object is being used. When a process thread or other stream of executable instructions finishes processing the object, an object lock or other assigned lock is acquired (if not already held) and the negative reference count is incremented to indicate that the object is no longer in use by that particular process thread. Upon deletion, the negative reference count is incremented and will now be equivalent with the positive reference count if no process threads are still using the object. The object is destroyed when the positive reference count and the negative reference count are equivalent. The test for when the object should be destroyed occurs at the end of normal use processing as well as deletion processing since the object will not be destroyed until all process threads or other streams of executable instructions have finished their processing. Since the global lock need not be acquired a second time upon finishing processing, excessive global lock acquisition is reduced so that less lock contention occurs.

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