CREST: High-Performance Contention Resolution for Disaggregated Transactions

Distributed transaction systems can leverage memory disaggregation for efficient resource scaling, yet they experience significant performance degradation under high-contention workloads. We present CREST, a disaggregated transaction system that efficiently manages high-contention transaction workloads in disaggregated memory architectures via three key techniques: (i) cell-level concurrency control, which achieves more fine-grained transaction concurrency than existing record-level approaches and reduces remote access latencies using a metadata-aggregated record structure; (ii) localized execution, which allows compute nodes to operate on local uncommitted results to reduce blocking time; and (iii) parallel commits, which parallelize commit operations under transaction dependencies. Evaluation shows that CREST achieves a throughput gain of up to 1.92× over state-of-the-art systems under high-contention workloads.