Scalable and practical locking with shuffling

Abstract

Locks are an essential building block for high-performance multicore system software. To meet performance goals, lock algorithms have evolved towards specialized solutions for architectural characteristics (e.g., NUMA). However, inpractice, applications run on different server platforms and exhibit widely diverse behaviors that evolve with time (e.g., number of threads, number of locks). This creates performance and scalability problems for locks optimized for a single scenario and platform. For example, popular spinlocks suffer from excessive cache-line bouncing in NUMA systems, while scalable, NUMA-aware locks exhibit sub-par single-thread performance.