Deadlock detection is really cheap

The treatment of deadlock has previously been considered as expensive, and implementations of the involved algorithm have appeared rather complex. In this paper a new algorithm for the treatment of deadlock is described. It is not only very efficient (in the worst case O(e) where e is the number of the edges in the “wait-for” graph) but also fairly simple. With this algorithm one can detect all deadlocks as soon as possible and list all participators in the corresponding cycle of the “wait-for” graph. The algorithm is described for the use of database transaction management.