[willothy]

The blocking mainly occurs due to contention - imo most of the performance gain comes from being able to poll the lock instead of blocking until it's available when acquiring locks on shards.

In all honesty I was quite surprised by the benchmarks as well though, I wouldn't expect that much performance gain, but in high-contention scenarios it definitely makes sense.

[conradludgate]

Benchmarks will always look good when using a spin-lock like you seem to be using here https://github.com/fortress-build/whirlwind/blob/0e4ae5a2aba...

[dwattttt]

I believe that doesn't indicate it's spinlocking; the `poll` API is specified to not block.