> To forestall this scenario, I'm thinking of introducing backoff into the
> sleep intervals --- that is, after first failure to get the spinlock,
> sleep 10 msec; after the second, sleep 20 msec, then 40, etc, with a
> maximum sleep time of maybe a second. The number of iterations would be
> reduced so that we still time out after a minute's total delay.
After the first few sleeps should it add a random() element to the delay
time?