System and method for supporting a low contention queue in a distributed data grid

Abstract

A system and method which supports a low contention queue in a multithreaded processing environment such as a distributed data grid. The queue is optimized to reduce memory contention and queue processing overhead, and is lock-free. The queue includes a doubly-linked list of nodes, wherein each node is associated with a value, a reference to a next node and a reference to a previous node. Furthermore, the queue allows one or more consumer threads to access the queue via a reference to a last removed node from the doubly linked list, and allows one or more producer threads to insert a new node via a reference to a tail node in the doubly-linked list. The low queue efficiently serves large number of threads with reduced contention, overhead, and latency, thereby improving performance in a multithreaded processing environment such as a distributed data grid.