I read somewhere (can't find the page anymore) that lock free data structures are more efficient "for certain workloads" which seems to imply that sometimes they're actually slower or the gain from them can be zero in some situations. Taking the ~100 cycle hit of a lock instruction to do an atomic op sounds plenty faster to me than going to sleep and waiting for the scheduler to wake the process back up, so it's not obvious to me under what circumstances a lock free data structure would be less preferable than old fashioned mutexes. If the lock is available 99% of the time and the process doesn't have to go to sleep, is a mutex then faster? Is there a good rule of the thumb for knowing which way to go assuming a suitable lock free data structure is available?
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