Advantages of a large number of threads cf other approaches?

Ulf Wiger ulf.wiger@REDACTED
Thu Feb 19 17:56:48 CET 2004


On Tue, 17 Feb 2004 19:51:49 -0500, Shawn Pearce <spearce@REDACTED> 
wrote:


> Also due to the effects of the relatively small i-cache on some 
> processors, a well written emulator can in fact run faster than
> native code on very big applications.  If the application has very
> poor cache locatily in its instruction stream (randomly jumping to
> different functions) the i-cache can have a hard time keeping up.
> But if you move all of the code into the much larger d-cache (as
> in the case of an emulator) you can make the emulator fly
> as a much higher percentage of the application can be stored in the 
> d-cache.

Some work has been done on improving these aspects of BEAM, partly
due to Thomas Lindgren's work on low-level profiling of AXD 301
code, compiled with HiPE, JAM and BEAM. Björn G. took some of
Thomas's findings to heart and improved the cache hit ratio.


> Now this is easily worked around by using tools to reorder your native 
> code functions in the huge application such that they occur in execution 
> order.  I've seen this easily give a 40% performance boost (or more!)
> on x86 processors.  If you do this, you should easily beat the
> emulator.  :-)

I'm sure, but I've had reason to look at some low-level profiling
of large applications written in Rational RoseRT, with a mix of
generated and hand-written C++. Lots of pipeline stalls and cache
misses


>
>> >You end up filling up the memory too quickly and soon start 
>> deterioating
>> >performance.
>>
>> I don't think so - if you take a server with 1 GB RAM, the process vs.
>> thread overhead will cut the number of processes you can serve from tens
>> of billions to billions (under the worst-case assumption that threads
>> don't use any local data on their own).
>> As soon as every thread allocates a KByte of memory, the memory overhead
>> diminishes to a factor of two, and it decreases further as each thread
>> uses more memory.
>> But even in the worst case, I suspect that the true bottleneck is the
>> CPU, not RAM.
>
> Its more like RAM bandwidth.  Your CPU is most likely stalling on all of 
> the
> context switches due to the amount of data it must keep swapping on and 
> off
> of the chip core.  Cycling through a bunch of registers ain't cheap.  And
> whacking your pipeline on a very deeply pipelined processor is no walk 
> in the
> park either.  Then take into account the d-cache, i-cache and TLB misses 
> you
> incur on each switch, and things go downhill very fast.
>
> Of course, there are applications (like Mozilla!) that will just consume 
> all
> memory on your machine, and then some, so you better not run multiple 
> copies
> of them at once.  :-)
>
>> The quoted IBM paper gave numbers for a concrete test run: a server with
>> 9 GB of RAM and eight 700-MHz processors had a near-100% CPU usage, but
>> just 36% memory usage (when serving 623 pages per second).
>> More interesting is that server performance increased by a factor of
>> six (!). Given that Yaws performance was ahead of Apache by a factor of
>> roughly 2.5 (at least on the benchmarks posted by Joe), it would be very
>> interesting to see how much Yaws profits from the new Linux kernel.
>
> Well, given that erts is bound to a single processor, you would need to
> create a cluster of erts nodes, all running yaws, with some type of load
> balancing front end.  This is one area Apache really shines in, as it
> easily allows this to be setup: because Apache is multi-process already, 
> it
> can easily share the single TCP server socket with all of its siblings 
> and
> decide who gets the next request.
>
> Does anyone think it might be possible to modify gen_tcp in such a way 
> that
> we could use multiple nodes on the same system all bound to the same TCP 
> port,
> and using some sort of accept lock between them?  I'd think this could 
> be done
> something like this:
>
> 	% Setup a server socket, but let it be shared by this Erlang node and 
> all
> 	% other process on this box.
> 	gen_tcp:accept(... [shared])
>
> 	% Have this node take over accepting all new connections.  This just 
> pokes
> 	% the socket into the erts event loop.
> 	gen_tcp:enable_accept(Port)
>
> 	% Have this node stop accepting new connections.  This just removes the
> 	% socket from the erts event loop.
> 	gen_tcp:disable_accept(Port)
>
> It might be necessary however (for performance reasons) to let the low 
> level
> C driver also perform its own accept lock using a sys-v IPC sem, flock, 
> fcntl,
> etc, on top of the Erlang managed enable and disable.    If the socket is
> enabled, then the driver should attempt to grab the accept lock, and only
> when it wins it it puts it into the erts event loop.  Clearly this might
> be difficult as the driver cannot block while trying to grab the accept 
> lock.
>
> Note that Linux doesn't require the accept lock I believe... I think its
> accept only returns the socket to one process.  But I'm not positive.
>



-- 
Ulf Wiger, Senior System Architect
EAB/UPD/S

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