Fast and Scalable In-network Lock Management Using Lock Fission

Distributed lock services are extensively utilized in distributed systems to serialize concurrent accesses to shared resources. The need for fast and scalable lock services has become more pronounced with decreasing task execution times and expanding dataset scales. However, traditional lock managers, reliant on server CPUs to handle lock requests, experience significant queuing delays in lock grant latency. Advanced network hardware (e.g. programmable switches) presents an avenue to manage locks without queuing delays due to their high packet processing power. Nevertheless, their constrained memory capacity restricts the manageable lock scale, thereby limiting their effect in large-scale workloads.

This paper presents FISSLOCK, a fast and scalable distributed lock service that exploits the programmable switch to improve (tail) latency and peak throughput for millions of locks. The key idea behind FISSLOCK is the concept of lock fission, which decouples lock management into grant decision and participant maintenance. FISSLOCK leverages the programmable switch to decide lock grants synchronously and relies on servers to maintain participants (i.e., holders and waiters) asynchronously. By using the programmable switch for routing, FISSLOCK enables on-demand fine-grained lock migration, thereby reducing the lock grant and release delays. FISSLOCK carefully designs and implements grant decision procedure on the programmable switch, supporting over one million locks. Evaluation using various benchmarks and a real-world application shows the efficiency of FISSLOCK. Compared to the state-of-the-art switch-based approach (NetLock), FISSLOCK cuts up to 79.1% (from 43.0%) of median lock grant time in the microbenchmark and improves transaction throughput for TATP and TPC-C by 1.76× and 2.28×, respectively.