[erlang-questions] Re: How to make the Erlang VM predictible when spawning processes?

Ovidiu Deac ovidiudeac@REDACTED
Fri Jun 4 10:43:46 CEST 2010


I was hoping that the latency introduced by the OS would be lower and
we would have enough time to satisfy the 10ms requirement. If you are
right then I guess 10ms response time is not realistic on a standard
system.

Anyway we will do some tests first and then try to see what is doable
and what would be acceptable.

On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 9:04 AM, Raimo Niskanen
<raimo+erlang-questions@REDACTED> wrote:
> Just a naive thought.
>
> On any contemporary OS (Windows, Linux, MacOS X, BSD...) you should
> expect that the OS scheduler might throw you out about 10..20 ms
> for some arbitrary OS reason...
>
> Unless you run some OS with a more real-timeish scheduler,
> i think there are e.g Linux flavours for this.
>
> On Fri, Jun 04, 2010 at 01:45:26AM +0300, Ovidiu Deac wrote:
>> I'm back with some tests that I've just ran on an Intel Core i5/Linux
>> 2.6.32/erts v5.7.4.
>>
>> The results look more credible since 1000 processes are no longer
>> spawned in 1microsecond. Also the variance between separate test
>> executions is much smaller.
>>
>> But the problem remains if I spawn 1 milion processes I come across
>> spawns which take up to 18milliseconds. So again, any idea about how I
>> could make the VM to be predictible?
>>
>> I assume that I should find the level of load that it can take.
>> Reusing processes as I would have done in other languages sounds like
>> a bad idea from start. Also I'm thinking I could increase the work
>> done by one process such that it's not too small but still it fits
>> inside the initial heap size so garbage collection is not needed.
>>
>> Also another thing that I observed is that during the test only about
>> 50% out of each processor seems to be used. At least this is what the
>> system monitor says. Any VM flags that would help with this? I tried
>> +P and +S but without results.
>>
>> Ovidiu
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 9:00 PM, Ovidiu Deac <ovidiudeac@REDACTED> wrote:
>> > Hello everybody,
>> >
>> > I'm doing some research in order to figure out if Erlang is suitable
>> > for an application that we need to implement.
>> >
>> > In a few words it's about a server which has a requirement saying "no
>> > request should take more then 10ms"', measured on the client's
>> > computer.
>> >
>> > So I started a couple of tests for various erlang components to figure
>> > out how much some operations would take. Partly because I wanted to
>> > get some figures and partly to exercise my Erlang skills.
>> >
>> > First I wrote a profiler module which can measure the execution time
>> > for various modules which implement set_up,tear_down and test_main.
>> > Also this profiler can repeat a test a number of times and returns a
>> > list with all the execution times, the minimum, the maximum and the
>> > average time. Nothing fancy.
>> >
>> > See the attachment for the profiler code and I post below some results
>> > for a test that I ran on a machine with Intel Core2 Duo/Win7/erlang
>> > v5.7.5. One test consists in 1000 spawns and is repeated 100 times.
>> > The times displayed are microseconds.
>> >
>> > $ make -C .. && erl +P 200000 -noshell -s profiler run spawn_test 100
>> > silent 0 1000 -s init stop
>> > make: Entering directory `/cygdrive/d/work/erlang/finn'
>> > make: Leaving directory `/cygdrive/d/work/erlang/finn'
>> > Module to test:spawn_test, Repeats:100, Params=[silent,'0','1000']
>> > Times elapsed = [1,15998,1,1,1,1,14991,1,1,1,1,15991,1,1,1,1,15991,1,1,1,1,
>> >                 14991,1,1,1,1,15991,1,1,1,1,14991,1,1,1,1,15991,1,1,1,1,
>> >                 15991,1,1,1,1,1,14989,1,1,1,1,15991,1,1,1,1,15991,1,1,1,
>> >                 14993,1,1,1,15993,1,1,1,1,14991,1,1,1,1,15991,1,1,1,1,15991,
>> >                 1,1,1,1,14991,1,1,1,15993,1,1,1,1,15991,1,1,1,1,14991]
>> > Max us/execution=15998
>> > Min us/execution=1
>> > Variation=15997
>> > Average us/execution=3279.01
>> >
>> > The average time for spawning a process is around 3us which is very
>> > good. It's interesting to see that spawning 1000 processes took
>> > 1microsecond (!!!) Looks like some bug it the profiler. Also my main
>> > concern is that from time to time spawning a process takes around 15ms
>> > which is way too much.
>> >
>> > I tried to run erl +P 200000 but the behaviour is the same as without
>> > this parameter.
>> >
>> > Do you have any idea how to make the VM predictible in order to
>> > satisfy the 10ms requirement?
>> >
>> > Thanks in advance,
>> > Ovidiu
>> >
>>
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>
> --
>
> / Raimo Niskanen, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB
>


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