Brook-2PL: Tolerating High Contention Workloads with A Deadlock-Free Two-Phase Locking Protocol

TL;DR

Brook-2PL is a new deadlock-free two-phase locking protocol that improves high-contention workload performance by using a novel dependency graph and partial transaction chopping for early lock release.

Contribution

It introduces SLW-Graph for deadlock avoidance and a flexible transaction chopping method, advancing concurrency control in high-contention environments.

Findings

Achieves 2.86x speed-up over state-of-the-art protocols.

Reduces tail latency (p95) by 48% in TPC-C benchmark.

Effectively handles high contention workloads with fewer aborts.

Abstract

The problem of hotspots remains a critical challenge in high-contention workloads for concurrency control (CC) protocols. Traditional concurrency control approaches encounter significant difficulties under high contention, resulting in excessive transaction aborts and deadlocks. In this paper, we propose Brook-2PL, a novel two-phase locking (2PL) protocol that (1) introduces SLW-Graph for deadlock-free transaction execution, and (2) proposes partial transaction chopping for early lock release. Previous methods suffer from transaction aborts that lead to wasted work and can further burden the system due to their cascading effects. Brook-2PL addresses this limitation by statically analyzing a new graph-based dependency structure called SLW-Graph, enabling deadlock-free two-phase locking through predetermined lock acquisition. Brook-2PL also reduces contention by enabling early lock release using partial transaction chopping and static transaction analysis. We overcome the inherent limitations of traditional transaction chopping by providing a more flexible chopping method. Evaluation using both our synthetic online game store workload and the TPC-C benchmark shows that Brook-2PL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art CC protocols. Brook-2PL achieves an average speed-up of 2.86x while reducing tail latency (p95) by 48% in the TPC-C benchmark.