Concurrent data structure design

Question

I am trying to come up with the best data structure for use in a high throughput C++ server. The data structure will be used to store anything from a few to several million obje

Answer 1

If you don't need a sort order, don't use a red/black tree or anything else that inherently sorts.

Your question is not well specified enough w.r.t to interaction between reads and writes. Would it be ok if a "read" is implemented by a lock+copy+unlock and then use the new copy?

You may want to read about seqlocks in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seqlock, and on "lock free" processes in general -- though, you may want to relax your requirements as much as possible -- a lock-free hash table implementation is a major undertaking.