Ruminating on MongoDB concurrency

In my previous post, I had discussed about the transaction support in MongoDB. Since MongoDB implements a ReadersWriter lock at the database level, I was a bit concerned that a writer lock for a long query may block all read operations for the time the query is running.

For e.g. If we fire a mongoDB query that updates 10,000 documents that would take 5 mins. Would all reads be blocked for the 5 mins till all the records are udpated? If yes, then that would be disastrous.

Fortunately this does not happen, due to lock yielding as stated on the MongoDB site.
Snippet from the site:
"Write operations that affect multiple documents (i.e. update() with the multi parameter,) will yield periodically to allow read operations during these long write operations. Similarly, long running read locks will yield periodically to ensure that write operations have the opportunity to complete."

Read locks are shared, but "read locks" block write locks from being acquired. Write locks prevent both other writes and reads. But MongoDB operations yield periodically to keep other threads waiting for locks from starving. An interesting blog post that shows stats on the performance of MongoDB locks is available here.