# A Concurrency Cost Hierarchy

DevFeed: [A Concurrency Cost Hierarchy](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/a-concurrency-cost-hierarchy-28489.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2020/07/06/concurrency-costs.html>)

Author: Travis Downs (travis.downs@gmail.com)

Published: 2020-07-06T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Performance Matters](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/performance-matters.md>)

Topics: [Concurrency](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/concurrency.md>), [Optimization](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/optimization.md>), [Benchmark](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/benchmark.md>), [Hardware](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/hardware.md>)

Tags: [benchmark](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/benchmark.md>), [blog](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/blog.md>), [c-plus-plus](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/c-plus-plus.md>), [concurrency](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/concurrency.md>), [hardware](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/hardware.md>), [optimization](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/optimization.md>), [performance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/performance.md>), [threads](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/threads.md>)

## AI overview

This article presents a six-level hierarchy for reasoning about the performance costs of concurrent operations, from fast to slow. It uses safely incrementing a shared counter across threads as a practical example and provides benchmark source, results, and hardware context.

## Source excerpt

Concurrent operations can be grouped relatively neatly into categories based on their cost