file locking...

[bruce]

Hi.

Got a bit of a question/issue that I'm trying to resolve. I'm asking this of
a few groups so bear with me.

I'm considering a situation where I have multiple processes running, and
each process is going to access a number of files in a dir. Each process
accesses a unique group of files, and then writes the group of files to
another dir. I can easily handle this by using a form of locking, where I
have the processes lock/read a file and only access the group of files in
the dir based on the  open/free status of the lockfile.

However, the issue with the approach is that it's somewhat synchronous. I'm
looking for something that might be more asynchronous/parallel, in that I'd
like to have multiple processes each access a unique group of files from the
given dir as fast as possible.

So.. Any thoughts/pointers/comments would be greatly appreciated. Any
pointers to academic research, etc.. would be useful.

thanks