Testing Race Conditions in WordPress
WordPress is not thread-safe.
I’ve spoken about this, and even started work on a plugin called WP_Lock that will aim to introduce some thread-safety into core to address the occasional TOCTOU bug under high load (and concurrency). For example ticket #44568 is an easy-to-reproduce complaint about concurrent REST API access 😉
If you thought writing thread-safe code in WordPress plugins is hard, unit testing the code for concurrency issues is even harder. One of the ways I found works best is by utilizing the PCNTL module in PHP to fork and test critical sections.