Livelock Deadlock and Starvation

Lets go through the single word definition of above three.
Livelock - You first, You first
Deadlock - Me first, Me first
Starvation - Some first, Others never

What is Deadlock?

Deadlock is a situation when two processes, each having a lock on one piece of data, attempt to acquire a lock on the other's piece. Each process would wait indefinitely for the other to release the lock, unless one of the user processes is terminated.

What is Livelock?

A livelock is one, where a request for an exclusive lock is repeatedly denied because a series of overlapping shared locks keeps interfering.

A human example of live lock would be two people who meet face-to-face in a corridor and each moves aside to let the other pass, but they end up moving from side to side without making any progress because they always move the same way at the same time and never cross each other. This is good example of live lock.

What is Starvation?

If a thread is not granted CPU time because other threads grab it all, it is called "starvation". The thread is "starved to death" because other threads are allowed the CPU time instead of it. The solution to starvation is called "fairness" - that all threads are fairly granted a chance to execute.

Starvation describes a situation where a thread is unable to gain regular access to shared resources and is unable to make progress. This happens when shared resources are made unavailable for long periods by "greedy" threads. For example, suppose an object provides a synchronized method that often takes a long time to return. If one thread invokes this method frequently, other threads that also need frequent synchronized access to the same object will often be blocked.