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The Cost of Concurrency Coordination with Jon Gjengset

Jon Gjengset, John, Gabriel Kreiman

The presentation challenges the conventional view that mutexes are inherently slow, demonstrating instead that performance degradation in high-concurrency environments stems from CPU cache coherence overheads and MESI protocol costs rather than the lock mechanism itself. To address false sharing and serialization issues found in reader-writer locks, the speaker details the Left-Right data structure, a lock-free architecture that achieves linear scaling for read-heavy workloads by decoupling reader access from writer synchronization. Finally, the discussion emphasizes that optimal synchronization strategy depends on the specific read-to-write ratio and consistency requirements, urging developers to profile cache behavior and avoid blind optimization of lock primitives.