On Transactional Memory, Spinlocks, and Database Transactions
Khai Q. Tran, Spyros Blanas, Jeffrey F. Naughton · 2010
Currently, hardware trends include a move toward multicore processors, cheap and persistent variants of memory, and even sophisticated hardware support for mutual exclusion in the form of transactional memory. These trends, coupled with a growing desire for extremely high performance on short database transactions, raise the question of whether the hardware primitives developed for mutual exclusion can be exploited to run database transactions. In this paper, we present a preliminary exploration of this question. We conduct a set of experiments on both a hardware prototype and a simulator of a multi-core processor with Transactional Memory (TM.) Our results show that TM is attractive under low contention workloads, while spinlocks can tolerate high contention workloads well, and that in some cases these approaches can beat a simple implementation of a traditional database lock manager by an order of magnitude. 1.