--- /dev/null
+---
+name: per-loop-affinity
+description: Design pattern for per-loop (per-thread) sharded data structures in BIND 9 — isc_tid() affinity replaces locking, foreign mutation becomes mark + owner lazy-reap, and eviction pressure must spread across shards. Use when designing or reviewing sharded LRU/SIEVE caches, per-loop lists, or any structure partitioned by loop/thread id.
+---
+
+# Per-loop affinity: ownership instead of locking
+
+When a data structure is sharded per event-loop and each shard is owned
+exclusively by its loop (`isc_tid()` affinity), the owner needs no
+locking for insert/walk/unlink at all. The rules below preserve that
+exclusivity; break any of them and the design degrades back to a locked
+(or racy) structure.
+
+## Ownership rules
+
+- **Owner-only mutation and traversal.** Only the owning loop touches
+ the shard's link pointers. Foreign threads never walk, unlink, or
+ even *read* link pointers — peeking at them cross-thread is a data
+ race (TSAN will find it), not an optimization.
+- **Foreign deletion = mark + hand over, owner reaps lazily.** A
+ deleter on another thread marks the entry dead (an atomic attribute)
+ and hands the *exact entry* to the owner — a wait-free MPSC stack per
+ shard works well; the push takes its own reference because the hint
+ races the owner's eviction walk. The owner unlinks during its own
+ subsequent operations, off any hot lock.
+- **Never make anyone scan for marked entries.** An O(shard) sweep to
+ *find* dead entries — by the owner or anyone else — degrades
+ progressively as the shard grows and can collapse throughput under
+ load. The handoff must carry the entry itself.
+- **Gate the handoff with an atomic membership bit** (owner sets it at
+ insert, clears it at every unlink path, including teardown). A stale
+ bit means pushing onto a never-drained stack; a missing gate means
+ double handoff.
+- **The shard holds its own reference to every linked entry**, so a
+ marked entry can outlive its parent object; store whatever the reaper
+ needs to finish the job (e.g. a lock index) in the entry itself
+ rather than reaching through pointers that may be gone.
+- **Bound zombie lifetime.** If reaping only happens during eviction, a
+ below-limit shard never reaps; advance a small reap cursor on each
+ insert so marked entries cannot accumulate unboundedly.
+
+## Eviction fairness across shards
+
+- **Never drain one shard to satisfy a purge before moving to the
+ next** — that degrades LRU/SIEVE to random mass-eviction of whichever
+ shard was picked first. Spread the pressure: evict one entry per
+ shard round-robin, or avoid sharding the eviction structure that
+ finely in the first place.
+- Better still, **colocate eviction capacity with insert pressure**:
+ each loop evicts from its own shard, so a busy loop owns a
+ proportionally bigger shard and eviction scales with the load that
+ created it, by construction.
+
+Related: the rcu-mutation skill covers the reader-visible side
+(publish/reclaim discipline) of the same structures.