Simulating race conditions in Python

If you have already downloaded the code for this book from the GitHub page, go ahead and navigate to the Chapter14 folder.

To simulate a race condition, first, we need a common resource. In this case, it's a counter variable along with multiple threads that can access it simultaneously. Let's take a look at the Chapter14/example1.py file—specifically, the update() function, as follows:

import random
import time
def update():
    global counter
    current_counter = counter # reading in shared resource
    time.sleep(random.randint(0, 1)) # simulating heavy 
    calculations
    counter = current_counter + 1 # updating shared 
    resource

The goal of the preceding update() function is to increment a global variable called counter, and it is to be called by a separate thread in our script. Inside the function...