A lock-free relaxed concurrent queue for fast work distribution

Abstract

The operation of modern systems requires the low latency and high throughput of producer-consumer communication over shared memory. In order to achieve fast communication at high concurrency, we define a relaxed ordering model that splits the queue operations into two stages, the sequential assignment to queue slots and their subsequent concurrent execution. Based on this model, we design and implement the linearizable and lock-free algorithm called Relaxed Concurrent Queue Single (RCQS). We experimentally show that RCQS achieves factors to orders of magnitude advantage over the state-of-the-art queue algorithms in operation latency and item transfer speed.