wfox

... or only lock on writes but not reads...

Are you saying this is always wrong? I thought that depended on the use case at hand.

But the guy answering there is talking about the Java clients.

Source?

Yeah but in high performance web app the real competence for C and C++ are JVM languages (Java, Scala, etc.), not Ruby and Python. Twitter switched from Ruby to Scala/Java because Ruby performance was terrible.

Could they have used C/C++ for better performance? Yeah, but Java was goodEnough and for most high performance web apps it is GoodEnough, the cost being some more money for hardware (for Ruby and Python the cost is a lot higher and sometimes not even with expensive hardware you can solve the problems):

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GoodEnough

Just like C++ became GoodEnough and people switched to it from C for high performance apps, just like C became GoodEnough and we switched from assembly to C.

Now we need one woman, one black and one homosexual getting 50% speakers of each group at a tech conference.

Why are you ignoring HotSpot?