In 2.2, some idle conns usage metrics were added by commit cf612a045 ("MINOR: servers: Add a counter for the number of currently used connections."), which mentioned that the operation doesn't need to be atomic since we're not seeking exact values. This is true but at least we should use atomic stores to make sure not to cause invalid values to appear on archs that wouldn't guarantee atomicity when writing an int, such as writing two 16-bit words. This is pretty unlikely on our targets but better keep the code safe against this. This may be backported as far as 2.2.