Thursday, March 16, 2006

SMP-Safe Queues Rule

Spinlocks are out, SMP-safe queues are in. All sites have been upgraded and have been running for several days without interruption.

Spinlocks, like any semaphore, should be avoided if possible - or so the conventional wisdom goes. And we understand a bit more about why it is considered conventional wisdom now.

SMP-safe queues have mutually exclusive read and write methods so that both operations can occur simultaneously. In our MTP2 implementation there is a single reader and writer for each of four queues. Three of the four queues are exposed to the potential for simultaneous reading and writing.

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