Performance analysis of dynamic locking with the no-waiting policy

Abstract

A transaction processing system with two-phase dynamic locking with the no waiting policy (DLNW) for concurrency control is considered. In this method, transactions making conflicting lock requests are aborted and restarted rather than blocked, thereby eliminating blocking delays (and deadlocks), but making it susceptible to cyclic restarts. Cyclic restarts are dealt with by delaying the restart of a transaction encountering a lock conflict or replacing it with a new transaction. Analytic solution methods for evaluating the performance of the variants of the DLNW method are described. The analytic methods, validated against simulation and shown to be acceptably accurate, are used to study the effect of the following parameters on system performance: transaction size and its distribution, degree of concurrency, the throughput characteristic of the computer system, and the mixture of read-only query and update transactions. A comparison of the DLNW and dynamic locking with waiting (DLW) methods shows that DLW provides higher throughput than DLNW, except when there is no hardware resource contention and conflicted transactions can be replaced by new transactions. The DLNW method outperforms the time-stamp ordering method, as observed from simulation results as well as case by case analyses of possible scenarios. >