Introduction to Concurrency Management

Motivation

Concurrent activities are common in a distributed system where thousands of client requests might be coming into service and clients might be expecting sub-second reply latency. Concurrency also comes into play when we need to parallelize different aspects of a request (for example, fetching relevant ads while data is being searched on a search engine). However, concurrent programming has a reputation for being difficult, where bugs can be subtle and might exhibit in strange ways at the most inconvenient time.

Different concurrency control mechanisms help us reason for the correctness of the concurrent activity.

What we will learn

We have selected the following three papers to discuss in the following few chapters:

• [2PL] ...