Latch-Free Index Trees That Scale: Avoiding Thread Switches & Stalls

David Lomet presents latch-free notices as a way to make index trees scale under high contention. Notices let contending threads elect a single winner early, so that the expensive work of consolidating pages, splitting nodes, and merging nodes is done once rather than redundantly, while the notice also guards the state being replaced and routes concurrent updates. The talk covers latch-free basics with CAS, the cost of delta chains, and detailed walkthroughs of consolidation, splits, and merges in the Bw-tree.