{"ID":2823383,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00208","arxiv_id":"2601.00208","title":"Avoiding Thread Stalls and Switches in Key-Value Stores: New Latch-Free Techniques and More","abstract":"A significant impediment to high performance in key-value stores is the high cost of thread switching or stalls. While there are many sources for this, a major one is the contention for resources. And this cost increases with load as conflicting operations more frequently try to access data concurrently. Traditional latch-based approaches usually handle these situations by blocking one or more contending threads. Latch-free techniques can avoid this behavior. But the payoff may be limited if latch-free techniques require executing wasted work. In this paper, we show how latch-free techniques exploit delta record updating and can significantly reduce wasted work by using notices, a new latch-free approach. This paper explains how notices work and can solve B-tree index maintenance problems, while avoiding thread switches or stalls. Other opportunities for avoiding thread switches or stalls are also discussed.","short_abstract":"A significant impediment to high performance in key-value stores is the high cost of thread switching or stalls. While there are many sources for this, a major one is the contention for resources. And this cost increases with load as conflicting operations more frequently try to access data concurrently. Traditional la...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00208","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.00208v1","authors":"[\"David Lomet\",\"Rui Wang\"]","published":"2026-01-01T04:53:59Z","proceeding":"cs.DB","tasks":"[\"cs.DB\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}