> Perhaps it is time for a thought pause, and see if other FB Arch
> readers have good ideas or suggestions.

Fine. But before we stop, some more brain food (Warning: the language of
the article is not very appropriate in girls college, but I hope that
our list can digest it somehow :)

Sun may or may not be about to obliterate Oracle and Microsoft
(http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/28/sun_dziuba_tm/)

"It's very possible that Sun Microsystems has their shit together as
they engineer the new Rock processor. Due out in 2009, it will be the
first mainstream CPU to support transactional memory. Transactional
memory will not only solve all your horrid threading problems, it will
also impregnate your daughter if you don't keep an eye on it. Don't say
I didn't warn you, gramps.

...

But will it actually work? Sun published a few papers about HyTM last
year, and they were a shot across the bow to Oracle. Sun, it seems,
employs some of the same passive aggressive nerds that your organization
does. In their papers, they showed the effect that HyTM has on
BerkeleyDB. Rewritten using Sun's scheme, BDB's locking subsystem
achieves several orders of magnitude more throughput as the number of
threads grows linearly. Oracle owns Sleepycat Software, the developers
of BerkeleyDB. The dicks have been thrown down, and Sun's is dragging in
the dirt."