Tag: cmpxchg

A spanking new ReaderWriterSpinlock

Well, I never. There is life in the old spinlock yet!

Being a synchronisation fetishist, I took great interest in last week’s great blog post by Sanjay Mishra and Arvind Shyamsundar about the ReaderWriterSpinlock added in 2016 CU2. Great story, happy ending, room for a sequel, all good news.

We have already seen recent improvement in the reader-writer lock algorithm, so clearly people are finding more corners to squeeze. Now what, pray tell, is a reader-writer spinlock?
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The Latch Files: Out for the count

Time to start chipping away at the monster subject of storage engine latches. If you’re anything like me, you were really impressed by the expositions of latches done by James Rowland-Jones (in Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting) and Bob Ward (PASS Summit “Inside Latches” session) when this information first started dribbling out. Now we have reached a point in history where latches seem to be used as a swear word. Well, for the record, I am still fascinated by them, and their internals are pretty darn marvellous.

Today I’m going to keep it comparatively focused, looking at nothing other than the Count member of the LatchBase class. Specifically, I’ll only be considering the act of acquiring an uncontended un-promoted latch, based on the SQL Server 2014 and 2016 latch implementation.
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