Comment by judofyr

Lock-free data structures does not guarantee higher throughput. They guarantee lower latency which often comes at the expense of the throughput. A typical approach for implementing a lock-free data structure is to allow one thread to "take over" the execution of another one by repeating parts of its work. It ensures progress of the system, even if one thread isn't being scheduled. This is mainly useful when you have CPUs competing for work running in parallel.

The performance of high-contention code is a really tricky to reason about and depends on a lot of factors. Just replacing a mutex with a lock-free data structure will not magically speed up your code. Eliminating the contention completely is typically much better in general.