The LMAX Disruptor: How a Ring Buffer Changed My Mental Model of Queues
In mid-2013 we replaced our internal LinkedBlockingQueue-based event bus with the LMAX Disruptor. Median latency dropped by 30%. The 99th percentile dropped by more than half. The change touched about 400 lines of code. This post is about the conceptual model you need to understand why the Disruptor is fast — not just “it uses a ring buffer,” but what that actually means for your hardware. ...