Table of Contents

• Overview
• Prerequisites
• Scenarios
• How to Run
• Unit Tests
• Key Concepts

Overview

The Producer-Consumer Problem is a classic concurrency problem where producers generate data and consumers retrieve it from a shared buffer.

Synchronization ensures:

Producers wait if the buffer is full.

Consumers wait if the buffer is empty.

Prerequisites

C++17 or later

Multithreading support (Linux, macOS, Windows)

Scenarios

Buffer Not Full

• Producer and consumer operate at similar speed.
• Buffer never exceeds maximum size (10).

Buffer Full

• Producer starts first and fills the buffer.
• Consumer starts after a delay to demonstrate full-buffer behavior.

How to run

g++ -std=c++17 producer_consumer.cpp -pthread -o producer_consumer ./producer_consumer

Unit Tests

Unit tests verify the correctness of the buffer logic independently of threads.

Uses GoogleTest framework.

Tests include:

Buffer starts empty.

Producing a single item increases the size.

Consuming an item decreases the size.

To run unit tests with Cmake:

use ctest from build directory or ./tests on Linux / Debug\tests.exe on Windows

Key Concepts

• std::mutex – Protects shared buffer.
• std::unique_lock – Flexible lock for condition variables.
• std::condition_variable – Waits for buffer conditions.
• Thread Sleep – Simulates production/consumption delays.