We describe our experiences with the Chubby lock service, which is intended to provide coarse-grained locking as well as reliable (though low-volume) storage for a loosely-coupled distributed system. Chubby provides an interface much like a distributed ï¬le system with ad-
visory locks, but the design emphasis is on availability and reliability, as opposed to high performance. Many instances of the service have been used for over a year, with several of them each handling a few tens of thousands of clients concurrently. The paper describes the
initial design and expected use, compares it with actual use, and explains how the design had to be modiï¬ed to accommodate the differences.
