I have a thread pool with some threads (e.g. as many as number of cores) that work on many objects, say thousands of objects. Normally I would give each object a mutex to protect access to its internals, lock it when I'm doing work, then release it. When two threads would try to access the same object, one of the threads has to wait.

Now I want to save some resources and be scalable, as there may be thousands of objects, and still only a hand full of threads. I'm thinking about a class design where the thread has some sort of mutex or lock object, and assigns the lock to the object when the object should be accessed. This would save resources, as I only have as much lock objects as I have threads.

Now comes the programming part, where I want to transfer this design into code, but don't know quite where to start. I'm programming in C++ and want to use Boost classes where possible, but self written classes that handle these special requirements are ok. How would I implement this?

My first idea was to have a boost::mutex object per thread, and each object has a boost::shared_ptr that initially is unset (or NULL). Now when I want to access the object, I lock it by creating a scoped_lock object and assign it to the shared_ptr. When the shared_ptr is already set, I wait on the present lock. This idea sounds like a heap full of race conditions, so I sort of abandoned it. Is there another way to accomplish this design? A completely different way?