What “thread safe” really means…In Practical terms

Question

please bear with my newbie questions..

I was trying to convert PDF to PNG using ghostscript, with ASP.NET and C#. However, I also read that ghostscript is not thread saf

Answer 1

1. Thread safe basically means that a piece of code will function correctly even when accessed by multiple threads. Multiple problems can occur if you use non-thread safe code in a threaded application. The most common problem is deadlocking. However, there are much more nefarious problems (race conditions) which can be more of a problem because thread issues are notoriously difficult to debug.

2. No. Multithreaded rendering just means that GS will be able to render faster because it is using threads to render (in theory, anyway - not always true in practice).

3. That really depends on what you want to use your renderer for. If you are going to be accessing your application with multiple threads, then, yes, you'll need to worry about it being thread safe. Otherwise, it's not a big deal.