Generic Concurrency Restriction (GCR) may divide a set of threads waiting to acquire a lock into two sets: an active set currently able to contend for the lock, and a passive set waiting for an opportunity to join the active set and contend for the lock. The number of threads in the active set may be limited to a predefined maximum or even a single thread. Generic Concurrency Restriction may be implemented as a wrapper around an existing lock implementation. Generic Concurrency Restriction may, in some embodiments, be unfair (e.g., to some threads) over the short term, but may improve the overall throughput of the underlying multithreaded application via passivation of a portion of the waiting threads.