The performance of WiredTiger applications can be sensitive to type of mutex used for serialization. WiredTiger can be configured, using the –with-spinlock argument during configuration to use one of three different mutex types: gcc, pthread and pthread_adaptive mutexes.

The gcc option configures GCC compiler (or compatible compilers such as clang), mutexes; the pthread option configures POSIX 1003.1c pthread mutexes; the pthread_adaptive option configures POSIX 1003.1c pthread mutexes with adaptive behavior (where that behavior is supported, for example, most Linux platforms).

By default, WiredTiger is configured to use pthread, that is, non-adaptive POSIX 1003.1c pthread mutexes.