Tag
contention
- Apr 11, 2026 Telling Saturation Apart From Contention A busy resource and a blocked one look identical in a latency graph. Queueing arithmetic, run-queue depth, off-CPU time, and steal time are what separate them. observability
- Apr 2, 2026 Amdahl and Gustafson Bounds in Capacity Models Why a serial fraction caps the throughput a fixed workload can reach, how scaled workload changes the bound, and what the usable-scalability limit means for sizing a fleet. performance engineering
- Oct 21, 2025 Atomic Contention and the L2 as a Serialization Point Why a global atomic executes at the cache slice that owns its address, how a hot counter turns a parallel machine into a queue, and which reductions avoid the queue entirely. gpu computing
- Oct 8, 2025 Critical Sections, Futexes, and What a Mutex Really Costs The path a mutex takes from uncontended atomic to sleeping thread, how Linux futexes avoid a syscall in the common case, and why uncontended cost predictions fail under contention. performance engineering
- Apr 26, 2025 Contention Ceilings and the Limits of Parallel Scaling Why adding workers to a shared counter, lock, or cache line stops helping, how the serial fraction bounds speedup, and which designs remove the ceiling instead of raising it. backend systems
- Dec 7, 2024 Thread-Local Caches and the Cost of a Remote Free Why per-thread free lists remove contention from malloc, what a free on the wrong thread must do, and how ownership transfer and rebalancing keep the design from stranding memory. memory systems
- Apr 2, 2024 The Universal Scalability Law: Why Throughput Peaks and Then Falls How contention and coherency terms extend Amdahl's bound into a curve that predicts a maximum, what retrograde scaling looks like, and how to fit the two parameters from measurements. performance engineering
- Feb 27, 2024 Compare-and-Swap Retry Loops and the ABA Problem on a Versioned Register Why an optimistic update loop can silently apply a stale decision, how version numbers close the window, and what the loop costs when contention is high. distributed systems
- Nov 26, 2023 Compare-and-Swap Retry Loops Under Contention Why a lock-free read-modify-write loop that is faster than a mutex with two threads is slower with twenty, and how to bound, batch, or replace the retry. performance engineering
- Jan 30, 2023 Cache Line Transfer, False Sharing, and the Cost of Contention Why an atomic operation on an uncontended location is cheap and on a contended one is not, what coherence protocol traffic each attempt generates, and how padding and sharding change the shape of the cost. systems programming
- Apr 22, 2022 Atomics and Contention in Counters and Aggregates Why a single global atomic counter serialises a kernel, how per-warp and per-block aggregation cuts that traffic, and which failure modes survive the optimisation. gpu computing