Skip to content

Spinlock pattern

The Spinlock pattern is a concurrency control mechanism where a thread repeatedly checks (spins) in a loop to see if a lock is available, rather than yielding execution or blocking.^[600-developer__big-data__netty__netty-rotate.md] This approach is often implemented using atomic operations to ensure thread safety without the overhead of context switching.^[600-developer__big-data__netty__netty-rotate.md]

Implementation

In programming environments like Java, a Spinlock is frequently constructed using an infinite loop that waits for a specific condition—typically the success of an atomic compare-and-swap operation—to become true.^[600-developer__big-data__netty__netty-rotate.md] For example, the compareAndSet method is used within a for(;;) loop to attempt a state update; the loop terminates only when the atomic update succeeds, ensuring that the operation completes atomically.^[600-developer__big-data__netty__netty-rotate.md]

Sources

^[600-developer__big-data__netty__netty-rotate.md]