nbdkit-memory-plugin is a RAM disk, but it is quite a slow one because
of the lock we must acquire on the sparse array. Try to improve
performance by changing this mutex for a read-write lock.
The results are somewhat mixed.
Note that in the real world, workloads which constantly update the
metadata are assumed to be fairly rare. The test program added in the
first patch exercises metadata updates a lot more aggressively than
would be expected.
Rich.