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Transparently Reconciling Transactions with Locking for Java Synchronization

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ECOOP 2006 – Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 4067))

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Abstract

Concurrent data accesses in high-level languages like Java and C# are typically mediated using mutual-exclusion locks. Threads use locks to guard the operations performed while the lock is held, so that the lock’s guarded operations can never be interleaved with operations of other threads that are guarded by the same lock. This way both atomicity and isolation properties of a thread’s guarded operations are enforced. Recent proposals recognize that these properties can also be enforced by concurrency control protocols that avoid well-known problems associated with locking, by transplanting notions of transactions found in database systems to a programming language context. While higher-level than locks, software transactions incur significant implementation overhead. This overhead cannot be easily masked when there is little contention on the operations being guarded.

We show how mutual-exclusion locks and transactions can be reconciled transparently within Java’s monitor abstraction. We have implemented monitors for Java that execute using locks when contention is low and switch over to transactions when concurrent attempts to enter the monitor are detected. We formally argue the correctness of our solution with respect to Java’s execution semantics and provide a detailed performance evaluation for different workloads and varying levels of contention. We demonstrate that our implementation has low overheads in the uncontended case (7% on average) and that significant performance improvements (up to 3×) can be achieved from running contended monitors transactionally.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47907, USA

    Adam Welc, Antony L. Hosking & Suresh Jagannathan

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  1. Adam Welc
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  2. Antony L. Hosking
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  3. Suresh Jagannathan
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  1. Bedarra Research Lab., 1 Stafford Road, Suite 421, K2H 1B9, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Dave Thomas

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Welc, A., Hosking, A.L., Jagannathan, S. (2006). Transparently Reconciling Transactions with Locking for Java Synchronization. In: Thomas, D. (eds) ECOOP 2006 – Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4067. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11785477_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11785477_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-35726-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-35727-8

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