Intro

A race condition occurs when the correctness or outcome of a system depends on the timing, order, or interleaving of operations that run concurrently. When two or more actions execute in parallel without proper coordination, they may read or modify shared data inconsistently, leading to unpredictable or unintended behavior.

Race conditions typically manifest as intermittent bugs, data corruption, duplicate processing, or state inconsistencies that are difficult to reproduce. They represent one of the most critical classes of defects in concurrent or highly scalable applications.