From a Chocolate Wrapper to Concurrent InnoDB Page Splits

A research prototype adds B-link-style concurrent page splits to MariaDB's InnoDB engine, removing the index-wide latch that serializes structural modification operations during page splits. The design, sketched with Monty Widenius and based on Zhao Song's earlier proposal, allows child splits to become visible before the parent tree is fully updated, using a two-phase publication with high keys and right links. On a split-heavy benchmark (2.5M preload rows, 32 threads, 24 GiB buffer pool), the prototype reached 102,838 inserts per second versus 19,676 for vanilla MariaDB, a 5.23x improvement, with p95 latency dropping from 8.28ms to 0.56ms. The implementation touches page representation, cursor navigation, mini-transaction ownership, and recovery, and remains a proof of concept with limitations including no in-place index conversion, restricted DDL, and non-persistent page pools.

Source: https://mariadb.org/from-a-chocolate-wrapper-to-concurrent-innodb-page-splits. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.