What is the lock-held-during-I/O anti-pattern and how do you fix it?

Holding a mutex while performing I/O (network calls, disk reads) serialises all goroutines that need that lock for the entire I/O duration. This collapses concurrency to near-zero throughput — one of the most common Go performance mistakes.

// ANTI-PATTERN: lock held during HTTP call
type Cache struct {
    mu    sync.Mutex
    items map[string]string
}

func (c *Cache) GetBad(key string) string {
    c.mu.Lock()
    defer c.mu.Unlock()
    if v, ok := c.items[key]; ok { return v }
    // LOCK HELD DURING NETWORK CALL — all other callers serialise here!
    resp, _ := http.Get("https://api.example.com/" + key)
    body, _ := io.ReadAll(resp.Body)
    c.items[key] = string(body)
    return c.items[key]
}

// CORRECT: release lock before I/O, re-acquire after
func (c *Cache) GetGood(key string) string {
    // Phase 1: fast check under lock
    c.mu.Lock()
    if v, ok := c.items[key]; ok {
        c.mu.Unlock()
        return v
    }
    c.mu.Unlock()

    // Phase 2: expensive I/O WITHOUT the lock
    resp, _ := http.Get("https://api.example.com/" + key)
    body, _ := io.ReadAll(resp.Body)
    result := string(body)

    // Phase 3: store result under lock
    c.mu.Lock()
    c.items[key] = result
    c.mu.Unlock()
    return result
}

// Even better: use singleflight to deduplicate concurrent fetches for the same key

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