Sixty Four Cores and One Door: Concurrent Data Structures

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 28, 2026 · 58m

In Mumbai, a brokerage buys sixty-four-core servers and its market-data system gets slower. In part seventeen of The Deep End's Data Structures series, team lead Rohan Mehta and new engineer Hannah Weiss discover why one lock can throttle a whole machine, and what it takes to let threads cooperate without waiting. Compare-and-swap, the ABA trap, the queue where threads finish each other's work, the Linux kernel's read-copy-update, Java's concurrent hash map, and a priority-inversion bug on Mars. Rohan and Hannah are fictional; the algorithms and incidents are real.

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