Touchedshared

Touchedshared is a term sometimes used in discussions of concurrent programming and memory management to describe a data resource that has been both accessed (touched) and is shared among multiple execution contexts, such as threads or processes. It is not a formal standard term; rather, it appears in informal documentation, profiling outputs, and debugging notes to indicate a pattern where a memory region or object is actively read or written by more than one actor.

In practice, identifying touchedshared regions can help diagnose issues related to data races, cache contention, or synchronization bottlenecks. Profiling tools or runtime systems may label areas as touchedshared when a memory address is observed to be accessed by multiple threads, or when shared ownership or references are detected. This labeling can guide developers to consider more robust synchronization, finer-grained locking, or redesigns of data structures to reduce contention.

In memory management and concurrent data structures, the idea of touchedshared relates to how data is accessed and shared across threads. It can inform decisions about memory ordering, synchronization primitives, and design choices in lock-free or weakly synchronized algorithms. However, because touchedshared is not a standardized concept, its exact interpretation can vary between tools, languages, and environments.

Limitations include ambiguity and inconsistent usage across ecosystems. As a nonstandard label, it should be interpreted with context from the specific tool or discussion in which it appears.

See also: data race, memory model, cache coherence, shared memory, concurrency.