Transactional HashMaps in the Myrrh Framework

Abstract

To improve the performance of transactional programming, we propose a new class of transactional data structures and introduce a transactional version of Java's HashMap class. This specialized HashMap class enables developers to take full advantage of the atomic and isolated properties of transactions in order to support concurrent access to different parts of a map. Furthermore, the validation and conflict resolution algorithm executed as part of the commit step resolves most types of potential conflict, thus allowing all transactions that don't directly conflict to commit. By using transactions to eliminate contention, and a specialized implementation of the HashMap class to resolve conflicts at commit-time, we significantly improve the efficiency of transactional programming