Nb-GCLOCK: A non-blocking buffer management based on the generalized CLOCK

In this paper, we propose a non-blocking buffer management scheme based on a lock-free variant of the GCLOCK page replacement algorithm. Concurrent access to the buffer management module is a major factor that prevents database scalability to processors. Therefore, we propose a non-blocking scheme for bufferfix operations that fix buffer frames for requested pages without locks by combining Nb-GCLOCK and a non-blocking hash table. Our experimental results revealed that our scheme can obtain nearly linear scalability to processors up to 64 processors, although the existing locking-based schemes do not scale beyond 16 processors.