A performance comparison of locking methods with limited wait depth

Abstract

A number of recent studies have proposed lock conflict resolution methods to improve the performance of standard locking, i.e., strict two-phase locking with the general waiting method. This paper is primarily concerned with the performance of wait depth limited methods with respect to each other and some other methods. The methods considered include the general waiting, wound-wait, and no-waiting methods, symmetric and asymmetric versions of cautious waiting and running priority methods, the wait depth limited (WDL) method, and a modified version of it. In spite of the availability of analytic solutions for most of wait depth limited methods, for reasons given in the paper, the performance comparison is based on simulation results. The contributions of this study are as follows: 1) modeling assumptions, i.e., a careful definition of transaction restart options; 2) new results concerning the relative performance of wait depth limited methods, which show that a) the running priority method outperforms cautious waiting and may even outperform the WDL method in a system with limited hardware resource, b) WDL outperforms other methods in high lock contention, high capacity systems, and c) modified WDL has a performance comparable to WDL, but incurs less overhead in selecting the abort victim; and 3) contrary to common belief, Tay's Effective Database Size Paradigm for dealing with shared and exclusive locks and/or skewed database accesses in standard locking is applicable to some wait depth limited methods and provides acceptably accurate approximations in others - as long as locking modes for restarted transactions are not resampled. © 1997 IEEE.