Lock-free transactional support for large-scale storage systems

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce ReTSO, a reliable and efficient design for transactional support in large-scale storage systems. ReTSO uses a centralized scheme and implements snapshot isolation, a property that guarantees that read operations of a transaction read a consistent snapshot of the data stored. The centralized scheme of ReTSO enables a lock-free commit algorithm that prevents unre-leased locks of a failed transaction from blocking others. We analyze the bottlenecks in a single-server implementation of transactional logic and propose solutions for each. The experimental results show that our implementation can service up to 72K transaction per second (TPS), which is an order of magnitude larger than the maximum achieved traffic in similar data storage systems. Consequently, we do not expect ReTSO to be a bottleneck even for current large distributed storage systems.