Hyaline: Fast and Transparent Lock-Free Memory Reclamation

Abstract

We present a new lock-free safe memory reclamation algorithm, Hyaline, which is fast, scalable, and transparent to the underlying data structures. Hyaline easily handles virtually unbounded number of threads that can be created and deleted dynamically, while retaining O(1) reclamation cost. We also extend Hyaline to avoid situations where stalled threads prevent others from reclaiming newly allocated objects, a common problem with epoch-based reclamation. Our evaluation reveals that Hyaline's throughput is high -- it steadily outperformed other reclamation schemes by >10% in one test and yielded even higher gains in oversubscribed scenarios.