How can std::lock_guard be faster than std::mutex::lock()?

Question

I was arguing with a colleague, about lock_guard, and he proposed that lock_guard is problably slower than mutex::lock() / mutex::unlock() due to the cost of instantiate and unistantiate the class lock_guard.

Then I created this simple test and, surprisely, the version with lock_guard is almost two times faster than the version with mutex::lock() / mutex::unlock()

#include <iostream>
#include <mutex>
#include <chrono>

std::mutex m;
int g = 0;

void func1()
{
    m.lock();
    g++;
    m.unlock();
}

void func2()
{
    std::lock_guard<std::mutex> lock(m);
    g++;
}

int main()
{
    auto t = std::chrono::system_clock::now();
    for (int i = 0; i < 1000000; i++)
    {
        func1();
    }

    std::cout << "Take: " << std::chrono::duration_cast<std::chrono::milliseconds>(std::chrono::system_clock::now() - t).count() << " ms" << std::endl;

    t = std::chrono::system_clock::now();
    for (int i = 0; i < 1000000; i++)
    {
        func2();
    }

    std::cout << "Take: " << std::chrono::duration_cast<std::chrono::milliseconds>(std::chrono::system_clock::now() - t).count() << " ms" << std::endl;

    return 0;
}

The results on my machine:

Take: 41 ms
Take: 22 ms

Can someone clarify why and how this can be?

Answer 1

The release build produces the same result for both versions.

The DEBUG build shows ~33% longer time for func2 ; the difference I see in the disassembly that func2 uses __security_cookie and invokes @_RTC_CheckStackVars@8 .

Are you timing DEBUG?

EDIT: Additionally, while looking at RELEASE disassembly, I noticed that mutex methods were saved in two registries:

010F104E  mov         edi,dword ptr [__imp___Mtx_lock (010F3060h)]  
010F1054  xor         esi,esi  
010F1056  mov         ebx,dword ptr [__imp___Mtx_unlock (010F3054h)]  

and called the same way from both func1 and func2 :

010F1067  call        edi  
....
010F107F  call        ebx