Yeah for sure, at any rate I went over the LMAX Disruptor link you provided and while it doesn't use "locks", it is not a lock-free data structure. The confusio

Yeah for sure, at any rate I went over the LMAX Disruptor link you provided and while it doesn't use "locks", it is not a lock-free data structure. The confusion is that their use of the work "lock" means yielding to the operating system, which they don't do, but if a thread is performing a write, then all other threads will spin in a tight loop (which is basically a spin lock) until the write is committed. This is not a lock-free data structure in the typical sense of the word (guarantees at least one thread will make progress) since if the JVM pre-empts the thread currently in the process of writing, then all other writing threads are starved. You can read more about it here in Section 4.3 on page 6 where they have the following busy waiting: long expectedSequence = claimedSequence – 1; while (cursor != expectedSequence) { // busy spin } cursor = claimedSequence https://lmax-exchange.github.io/disruptor/files/Disruptor-1.0.pdf https://lmax-exchange.github.io/disruptor/files/Disruptor-1.... Some other details of the blocking are here: http://mechanitis.blogspot.com/2011/07/dissecting-disruptor-why-its-so-fast.html http://mechanitis.blogspot.com/2011/07/dissecting-disruptor-...