Contention. Attempting to lock an already locked mutex is called contention. In a well-planned program, contention should be quite low. You should design your code so that most attempts to lock the mutex will not block. There are two reasons why you want to avoid contention.

What is meant by mutex?

In computer programming, a mutex (mutual exclusion object) is a program object that is created so that multiple program thread can take turns sharing the same resource, such as access to a file.

What is lock contention?

lock contention: this occurs whenever one process or thread attempts to acquire a lock held by another process or thread. The more fine-grained the available locks, the less likely one process/thread will request a lock held by the other.