Queues can be useful in a variety of systems involving data-stream processing. Typically, you have a data source producing data-requests coming to a web server, market feeds, or digital telephony packets-at a variable pace, and you need to process the data as fast as possible so there are no losses. To do this, you can push data into a queue using one thread and process it using a different thread-a good utilization of resources on multicore processors. One thread inserts data into the queue, and the other reads/deletes elements from the queue. Your main requirement is that a high-rate data burst does not last longer than the system's ability to accumulate data while the consumer thread handles it. The queue you use has to be threadsafe to prevent race conditions when inserting/removing data from multiple threads. For obvious reasons, it is necessary that the queue mutual exclusion mechanism add as little overhead as possible.
