Detail

Versioned Software Transactional Memory – An STM in the real world

The need to simplify the programming task of multiprocessor machines
has spurred intense research on the area of Software Transactional
Memory (STM). Unlike traditional lock-based mechanisms, STMs promise
to free the programmer from the burden of managing locks to ensure
consistent access to shared memory in a concurrent environment.

Yet, despite all the work made on STMs until now, most STM
implementations are still in the realms of research labs, rather than
being used to solve real world problems.

In this talk, I describe a new design for an STM model that was driven
by the needs of a real world large web application. This new STM
model is based on a form of multi version concurrency control and it
is specially suited for a large class of real world applications. I
describe the model, its implementation, and the results of its usage
in the Fénix web application over the last two years.