Livelock

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What Does Livelock Mean?

Livelock is a condition that takes place when two or more programs change their state continuously, with neither program making progress. Processes enter a state of livelock when they clash with each other’s state and fail to progress because both of them are changing the state, hence having the same state at a given time.

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Techopedia Explains Livelock

Livelock can be best explained with the help of an analogy of two people passing through a passageway and each tries to step around the other, but they end up swaying from side to side, getting in each other’s way as they try to get out of the way. Livelock is different from deadlock in a way that both the processes involved in livelock are repeatedly changing their states with regard to each other and not progressing. Algorithms are produced to get out of the state of livelock by randomly picking a process and stopping its state change.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.