Why it matters

Deadlocks are hard to reproduce and diagnose. Preventing them via disciplined patterns is much cheaper than debugging live incidents.

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The architecture

Four conditions (Coffman): mutual exclusion, hold and wait, no preemption, circular wait. All four must hold for deadlock.

Break any one: no deadlock possible.

Deadlock conditionsMutual exclusionone at a timeHold + waitacquire secondCircular waitcycle in depPrevention: establish global lock order to break circular wait
Coffman conditions.
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How it works end to end

Prevention: global lock ordering (break circular wait). Always acquire locks in same order.

Detection: timeout on lock acquisition. If timeout, release held locks and retry.

Avoidance: banker's algorithm. Only grant lock if safe. Impractical at scale.