[whatwg] RFC: Alternatives to storage mutex for cookies and localStorage

[Jonas Sicking]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 11:53 AM, Aaron Boodman<aa at google.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 11:23 AM, Chris Jones<cjones at mozilla.com> wrote:
>> In general, I agree with Rob about this proposal.  What problem with storage
>> mutex as spec'd today does your proposal solve?
>
> The spec requires a single storage mutex for the entire UA. Therefore
> in a MELUA a web page can become unresponsive while waiting for some
> other page to give up the lock. This is not good and something we have
> tried to avoid everywhere else in the spec.
>
> Attempts to address this by doing per-origin locks wind up with
> deadlocks being possible.

How could this happen. It certainly does sound scary to have a bunch
of locks that can be grabbed in arbitrary order, but I can't off the
top of my head think of any ways where deadlocks can happen.

/ Jonas