Software transactional memory should not be obstruction free

Abstract. Much previous work on Software Transactional Memory has gone to great lengths to be “obstruction-free ” — meaning that a transaction is guaranteed to make progress when all other transactions are suspended. In this paper we argue that obstruction-freedom is not an important property for soft-ware transactional memory, and demonstrate that, if we are prepared to drop the goal of obstruction-freedom, software transactional memory can be made significantly faster.