Locker: Consistent Distributed Locking - Knut Nesheim
Erlang Factory SF Bay Area 2013
More info and slides on the website: http://www.erlang-factory.com/confere...
Game servers built at Wooga uses Erlang processes to model users, worlds and connections. A locking mechanism was needed to ensure processes don't step on each other toes. This forms the backbone of distributed real-time multiplayer game servers at Wooga.
The first attempt used Redis as a central serialization point as
it offers a compare-and-swap operation. After hard work in the
following generations of game servers, this single point of failure was the last one still standing.
After long discussions and reading many papers, locker got
started as a Friday hack. How hard could it be to create a consistent distributed locking system from scratch?