Philosophers

This project is a version of the Dining Philosophers Problem.

Solving the Dining Philosopher problem dealing with deadlock and race conditions in multithreaded applications.

Rules

The program takes the following arguments:

./philo <number_of_philosophers> <time_to_die> <time_to_eat> <time_to_sleep> [number_of_times_each_philosopher_must_eat]

• number_of_philosophers: The number of philosophers and also the number of forks.
• time_to_die (in milliseconds): If a philosopher didn’t start eating time_to_die milliseconds since the beginning of their last meal or the beginning of the simulation, they die.
• time_to_eat (in milliseconds): The time it takes for a philosopher to eat. During that time, they will need to hold two forks.
• time_to_sleep (in milliseconds): The time a philosopher will spend sleeping.
• number_of_times_each_philosopher_must_eat (optional argument): If all philosophers have eaten at least number_of_times_each_philosopher_must_eat times, the simulation stops. If not specified, the simulation stops when a philosopher dies.

Output

The output of the program is in the format <timestamp> <philosopher (1 to number_of_philosophers)> <action>

Each philosopher logs the following actions:

• Taking a fork
• Eating
• Sleeping
• Thinking
• Dying

The logged messages are always in sequential order.

Installation & Usage

Clone this repository to your computer:

git clone https://github.com/MatPizzolo/philosophers.git

First compile and install library

cd philo && make

Run

./philo <number_of_philosophers> <time_to_die> <time_to_eat> <time_to_sleep> [number_of_times_each_philosopher_must_eat]

Example usage

The following example shows the result of 5 philosophers, that take 800ms to die, 200ms to eat, 200ms to sleep and will eat a minimum of 3 times (./philo 5 800 200 200 3):

Visually, it looks something like this (screenshot from philosophers-vizualizer):