Context

Go's atomic.Value type can perform a lot better than using a sync.RWMutex to guard values, especially when the use case is read-heavy and has a lot of concurrent contention. See some benchmarks here. We should use atomic.Value instead of a snc.RWMutex in those cases.

Definition of done

• Replace all uses of sync.RWMutex to guard values that are read frequently and written infrequently with atomic.Value.

Pitfalls

atomic.Value is not as useful for write-heavy or read-write balanced use cases. We should only use it for read-heavy use cases.

Note that we can't use most of the new types in the atomic package because they were added with Go 1.19.