Revision history [back]

I'm not an expert w.r.t what ROS is doing under the hood, but I'd be concerned that since you don't know how ROS is handling their spin queue with their messaging, you have the potential for a creating deadlock.

Here is link to thread where I initially posted a related question and recently updated with what we did. http://answers.ros.org/question/56275/suggest-good-example-of-multi-threading-with-ros/

I suggest you keep all locks only within your code with minimal overhead. Spinning from multiple threads sounds dangerous IMHO.