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A Lock-Free Move-To-Front List with a Working Set Bound

Authors Shalom Asbell , Eric Ruppert

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Concurrent algorithms
  • Theory of computation → Data structures design and analysis
Keywords
  • lock-free
  • move-to-front
  • self-adjusting data structures
  • working set bound
  • amortized analysis
  • linearizability

Metrics

Abstract

We give a lock-free move-to-front list that stores a set of keys, organized so that more recently accessed keys are closer to the front of the list. The amortized step complexity of an Insert, Delete or Search operation on a key k is proportional to the size of the operation’s working set - the number of distinct keys accessed since the last operation on k - plus the operation’s point contention. No previous concurrent, linearizable dynamic set has a complexity bound that adapts to the access pattern of keys. The number of reachable list nodes is at most the number of keys in the set plus contention.

Cite As Get BibTex

Shalom Asbell and Eric Ruppert. A Lock-Free Move-To-Front List with a Working Set Bound. In 40th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 397, pp. 20:1-20:22, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2026.20

Author Details

Shalom Asbell
  • York University, Toronto, Canada
Eric Ruppert
  • York University, Toronto, Canada

Funding

This research was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous referees for their comments and Mahnsi Ruparelia for helpful discussions.

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