Unfortunately I think this comment does is muddy the waters even more. All "lock free" means is that one process(+) may not cause any other process to block dur

Unfortunately I think this comment does is muddy the waters even more. All "lock free" means is that one process(+) may not cause any other process to block during execution. "Contention" is not very meaningful to a lock-free algorithm, since lock-free algorithms typically do not permit shared data access semantics. Rather they describe how data is sent between processes, which is why a lock-free solution looks very different than something behind mutexes. But to the heart of your point, I do wish people spent more time understanding that lock-free vs lock-ful is a distinction in semantics and doesn't imply anything about performance. There are subtle trade offs. (+) I'm using "process" with a lot of hand waving, assume it means whatever your atom of parallelism is