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Main Authors: Luo, Yicong, Hao, Senhe, Wheatman, Brian, Pandey, Prashant, Xu, Helen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21492
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author Luo, Yicong
Hao, Senhe
Wheatman, Brian
Pandey, Prashant
Xu, Helen
author_facet Luo, Yicong
Hao, Senhe
Wheatman, Brian
Pandey, Prashant
Xu, Helen
contents Skiplists are widely used for in-memory indexing in many key-value stores, such as RocksDB and LevelDB, due to their ease of implementation and simple concurrency control mechanisms. However, traditional skiplists suffer from poor cache locality, as they store only a single element per node, leaving performance on the table. Minimizing last-level cache misses is key to maximizing in-memory index performance, making high cache locality essential. In this paper, we present a practical concurrent B-skiplist that enhances cache locality and performance while preserving the simplicity of traditional skiplist structures and concurrency control schemes. Our key contributions include a top-down, single-pass insertion algorithm for B-skiplists and a corresponding simple and efficient top-down concurrency control scheme. On 128 threads, the proposed concurrent B-skiplist achieves between 2x-9x higher throughput compared to state-of-the-art concurrent skiplist implementations, including Facebook's concurrent skiplist from Folly and the Java ConcurrentSkipListMap. Furthermore, we find that the B-skiplist achieves competitive (0.9x-1.7x) throughput on point workloads compared to state-of-the-art cache-optimized tree-based indices (e.g., Masstree). For a more complete picture of the performance, we also measure the latency of skiplist and tree-based indices and find that the B-skiplist achieves between 3.5x-103x lower 99% latency compared to other concurrent skiplists and between 0.85x-64x lower 99% latency compared to tree-based indices on point workloads with inserts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_21492
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bridging Cache-Friendliness and Concurrency: A Locality-Optimized In-Memory B-Skiplist
Luo, Yicong
Hao, Senhe
Wheatman, Brian
Pandey, Prashant
Xu, Helen
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Skiplists are widely used for in-memory indexing in many key-value stores, such as RocksDB and LevelDB, due to their ease of implementation and simple concurrency control mechanisms. However, traditional skiplists suffer from poor cache locality, as they store only a single element per node, leaving performance on the table. Minimizing last-level cache misses is key to maximizing in-memory index performance, making high cache locality essential. In this paper, we present a practical concurrent B-skiplist that enhances cache locality and performance while preserving the simplicity of traditional skiplist structures and concurrency control schemes. Our key contributions include a top-down, single-pass insertion algorithm for B-skiplists and a corresponding simple and efficient top-down concurrency control scheme. On 128 threads, the proposed concurrent B-skiplist achieves between 2x-9x higher throughput compared to state-of-the-art concurrent skiplist implementations, including Facebook's concurrent skiplist from Folly and the Java ConcurrentSkipListMap. Furthermore, we find that the B-skiplist achieves competitive (0.9x-1.7x) throughput on point workloads compared to state-of-the-art cache-optimized tree-based indices (e.g., Masstree). For a more complete picture of the performance, we also measure the latency of skiplist and tree-based indices and find that the B-skiplist achieves between 3.5x-103x lower 99% latency compared to other concurrent skiplists and between 0.85x-64x lower 99% latency compared to tree-based indices on point workloads with inserts.
title Bridging Cache-Friendliness and Concurrency: A Locality-Optimized In-Memory B-Skiplist
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21492