{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/concurrent-size","title":"Concurrent Size","arxiv_id":"2209.07100","date":"2022-09-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Gal Sela","Erez Petrank"],"abstract":"The size of a data structure (i.e., the number of elements in it) is a widely used property of a data set. However, for concurrent programs, obtaining a correct size efficiently is non-trivial. In fact, the literature does not offer a mechanism to obtain a correct (linearizable) size of a concurrent data set without resorting to inefficient solutions, such as taking a full snapshot of the data structure to count the elements, or acquiring one global lock in all update and size operations. This paper presents a methodology for adding a concurrent linearizable size operation to sets and dictionaries with a relatively low performance overhead. Theoretically, the proposed size operation is wait-free with asymptotic complexity linear in the number of threads (independently of data-structure size). Practically, we evaluated the performance overhead by adding size to various concurrent data structures in Java$-$a skip list, a hash table and a tree. The proposed linearizable size operation executes faster by orders of magnitude compared to the existing option of taking a snapshot, while incurring a throughput loss of $1\\%-20\\%$ on the original data structure's operations.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.07100v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.07100v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"concurrent-size","repo_url":"https://github.com/galysela/concurrentsize","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}