# The XML C parser and toolkit of Gnome ## Thread safety

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Starting with 2.4.7, libxml2 makes provisions to ensure that concurrent threads can safely work in parallel parsing different documents. There is however a couple of things to do to ensure it: configure the library accordingly using the --with-threads options call xmlInitParser() in the "main" thread before using any of the libxml2 API (except possibly selecting a different memory allocator) Note that the thread safety cannot be ensured for multiple threads sharing the same document, the locking must be done at the application level, libxml exports a basic mutex and reentrant mutexes API in <libxml/threads.h>. The parts of the library checked for thread safety are: concurrent loading file access resolution catalog access catalog building entities lookup/accesses validation global variables per-thread override memory handling XPath is supposed to be thread safe now, but this wasn't tested seriously. Daniel Veillard