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Software Engineering vocabulary · Debugging and Troubleshooting

Livelock

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounAdvanced term

In software engineering, livelock means: A failure where tasks keep reacting or retrying but prevent one another from making useful progress.

In Turkish: canlı kilitlenme

How it is used

Used in concurrency debugging. Unlike deadlock, the tasks remain active rather than simply waiting indefinitely.

Example sentences

  1. Both workers kept releasing their locks and retrying, creating a livelock.

    Polite retries repeatedly interfere, so neither worker completes its work.

  2. Random retry delays removed the livelock in the competing update loops.

    Different retry times stop the workers from repeating the same conflict together.

Common collocations

  • avoid livelock
  • livelock detection
  • deadlockA situation where two or more transactions each wait for a lock the other holds, so none of them can continue until the database cancels one.
  • race conditionA situation in which a program's result depends on the timing or ordering of operations that may run concurrently.

More terms: Debugging and Troubleshooting

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