Unlike events, mutexes, and semaphores, which are also used for
multithreaded synchronization, critical sections don't always perform an
expensive control transfer to kernel mode. As you'll see later, acquiring an
unheld critical section requires, in effect, just a few memory modifications
and is very quick. Only if you try to acquire an already-held critical
section does it jump into kernel mode. The downside to this lightweight
behavior is that critical sections can only be used to synchronize threads
within the same process.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/03/12/CriticalSections/default.aspx


Posted via ActualForum NNTP Server 1.3