IIUC if you are holding locks for a very short amount of time you will have a higher probability of finding the lock free if you don't form queues on it in the

IIUC if you are holding locks for a very short amount of time you will have a higher probability of finding the lock free if you don't form queues on it in the first place, and you are able to make more progress without context switching. Although this makes the locking unfair, if each process holds onto it for only a very short amount of time avoiding the convoy and context switching overheads may be a good tradeoff for some unfairness. I don't think this would work for all kinds of locks, in particular not for locks that are held for long or unpredictable amounts of time (i.e. those involving I/O), but it should work great for in-memory data structures if you can avoid taking a pagefault while dealing with the data structure.