Wait-free hash maps in the entity-component-system pattern for realtime interactive systems

Abstract

In the past, the Entity-Component-System (ECS) pattern has become a major design pattern used in modern architectures for Realtime Interactive Systems (RIS). In this paper we introduce high performance wait-free hash maps for the System access of Components within the ECS pattern. This allows non-locking read and write operations, leading to a highly responsive low-latency data access while maintaining a consistent data state. Furthermore, we present centralized as well as decentralized approaches for reducing the memory demand of these memory-intensive wait-free hash maps for diverse RIS applications. Our approaches gain their efficiency by Component-wise queues which use atomic markup operations for fast memory deletion. We have implemented our new method in a current RIS and the results show that our approach is able to efficiently reduce the memory usage of wait-free hash maps very effectively by more than a factor of ten while still maintaining their high performance. Furthermore, we derive best practices from our numerical results for different use cases of wait-free hash map memory management in diverse RIS applications.