Definition: A deadlock is a situation where an application locks up because two or more activities are waiting for each other to finish. This occurs in multi-threaded software where a shared resource is locked by one thread and another thread is waiting to access it and something occurs so that the thread holding the locked item is waiting for the other thread to execute.
Another case where deadlock can occur is in databases where one application has asked for a lock on a table. It then requires a second table but another application has locked the second table and is waiting to get a lock on the first.
Glossary:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y ZExamples:
Deadlocks in a multi-threaded application can be difficult to track down and correct.
