Some uses of swrate_add() only consist in getting a rough estimate of
a frequency. There are cases where speed matters more than accuracy
(e.g. pools). For such use cases, let's just stop looping on the CAS,
if the update fails, another thread is already providing input, and
it's not dramatic to lose the race. All these functions are now
suffixed with "_opportunistic".
Right now when dealing with freq_ctr updates, we're using the process-
wide monotinic time, and accessing it is expensive since every thread
needs to update it, so this adds some contention. However we don't need
it all the time, the thread's local time is most of the time strictly
equal to the global time, and may be off by one millisecond when the
global time is switched to the next one by another thread, and in this
case we don't want to use the local time because it would risk to cause
a rotation of the counter. But that's precisely the condition we're
already relying on for the slow path!
What this patch does is to add a check for the period against the
local time prior to anything else, and immediately return after
updating the counter if still within the period, otherwise fall back
to the existing code. Given that the function starts to inflate a bit,
it was split between s very short inline part that does the hot path,
and the slower fallback that's in a cold function. It was measured that
on a 24-CPU machine it was called ~0.003% of the time.
The resulting improvement sits between 2 and 3% at 500k req/s tracking
an http_req_rate counter.
freq_ctr_overshoot_period() function may be used to retrieve the excess of
events over the current period for a givent frequency counter, ignoring the
history. It is a way compare the "current rate" (the number of events over
the current period) to a given rate and estimate the excess of events.
It may be used to safely add new events, especially at the begining of the
current period for a frequency counter with large period. This way, it is
possible to smoothly add events during the whole period without quickly
consuming all the quota at the beginning of the period and waiting for the
next one to be able to add new events.
update_freq_ctr_period() was using relaxed atomics without using barriers,
which usually works fine on x86 but not everywhere else. In addition, some
values were read without being enclosed by barriers, allowing the compiler
to possibly prefetch them a bit earlier. Finally, freq_ctr_total() was also
reading these without enough barriers. Let's make explicit use of atomic
loads and atomic stores to get rid of this situation. This required to
slightly rearrange the freq_ctr_total() loop, which could possibly slightly
improve performance under extreme contention by avoiding to reread all
fields.
A backport may be done to 2.4 if a problem is encountered, but last tests
on arm64 with LSE didn't show any issue so this can possibly stay as-is.
For stats reporting it can be convenient to report floats at low rates
instead of discrete integers. We do have quite some precision since we
currently divide counters by number of milliseconds, so we can usually
add 3 digits after the decimal point.
update_freq_ctr_period() was still not very clean and didn't wait for
the rotation lock to be dropped before trying again, thus maintaining
the contention at a high level. In addition, the rotation update was
made in three steps, which are not very efficient in terms of bus
cycles.
Here the wait loop was reworked so that the fast path remains short
and that the contended path waits for the lock to be dropped before
attempting another write, but it only waits a relax cycle before
attempting a read. The rotation block was simplified to remove a
test that was already validated by the first loop, and so that the
retrieval of the current period, its reset and its increment are all
performed in a single atomic op and the store to the previous period
is performed immediately after.
All this results in significantly smaller code for the inline function
(~1kB total) and a shorter critical path.
When counters are rotated, there is contention between the threads which
can slow down the operation of the thread performing the rotation. Let's
apply a cpu_relax there to let the first thread finish faster.
It remains cumbersome to preserve two versions of the freq counters and
two different internal clocks just for this. In addition, the savings
from using two different mechanisms are not that important as the only
saving is a divide that is replaced by a multiply, but now thanks to
the freq_ctr_total() unificaiton the code could also be simplified to
optimize it in case of constants.
This patch turns all non-period freq_ctr functions to static inlines
which call the period-based ones with a period of 1 second. A direct
benefit is that a single internal clock is now needed for any counter
and that they now all rely on ticks.
These 1-second counters are essentially used to report request rates
and to enforce a connection rate limitation in listeners. It was
verified that these continue to work like before.
Both structures are identical except the name of the field starting
the period and its description. Let's call them all freq_ctr and the
period's start "curr_tick" which is generic.
This is only a temporary change and fields are expected to remain
the same with no code change (verified).
There was still no function to compute a wait time for periods, let's
implement it on top of freq_ctr_total() as we'll soon need it for the
per-second one. The divide here is applied on the frequency so that it
will be replaced with a reciprocal multiply when constant.
This one is the easiest to implement, it just requires a call and a
divide of the result. Anti-flapping correction for low-rates was
preserved.
Now calls using a constant period will be able to use a reciprocal
multiply for the period instead of a divide.
Most of the functions designed to read a counter over a period go through
the same complex loop and only differ in the way they use the returned
values, so it was worth implementing all this into freq_ctr_total() which
returns the total number of events over a period so that the caller can
finish its operation using a divide or a remaining time calculation. As
a special case, read_freq_ctr_period() doesn't take pending events but
requires to enable an anti-flapping correction at very low frequencies.
Thus the function implements it when pend<0.
Thanks to this function it will be possible to reimplement the other ones
as inline and merge the per-second ones with the arbitrary period ones
without always adding the cost of a 64 bit divide.
Currently our atomic ops return a value but it's never known whether
the fetch is done before or after the operation, which causes some
confusion each time the value is desired. Let's create an explicit
variant of these operations suffixed with _FETCH to explicitly mention
that the fetch occurs after the operation, and make use of it at the
few call places.
In commit a1ecbca0a ("BUG/MINOR: freq_ctr/threads: make use of the last
updated global time"), for period-based counters, the millisecond part
of the global_now variable was used as the date for the new period. But
it's wrong, it only works with sub-second periods as it wraps every
second, and for other periods the counters never rotate anymore.
Let's make use of the newly introduced global_now_ms variable instead,
which contains the global monotonic time expressed in milliseconds.
This patch needs to be backported wherever the patch above is backported.
It depends on previous commit "MINOR: time: also provide a global,
monotonic global_now_ms timer".
The freq counters were using the thread's own time as the start of the
current period. The problem is that in case of contention, it was
occasionally possible to perform non-monotonic updates on the edge of
the next second, because if the upfront thread updates a counter first,
it causes a rotation, then the second thread loses the race from its
older time, and tries again, and detects a different time again, but
in the past so it only updates the counter, then a third thread on the
new date would detect a change again, thus provoking a rotation again.
The effect was triple:
- rare loss of stored values during certain transitions from one
period to the next one, causing counters to report 0
- half of the threads forced to go through the slow path every second
- difficult convergence when using many threads where the CAS can fail
a lot and we can observe N(N-1) attempts for N threads to complete
This patch fixes this issue in two ways:
- first, it now makes use og the monotonic global_now value which also
happens to be volatile and to carry the latest known time; this way
time will never jump backwards anymore and only the first thread
updates it on transition, the other ones do not need to.
- second, re-read the time in the loop after each failure, because
if the date changed in the counter, it means that one thread knows
a more recent one and we need to update. In this case if it matches
the new current second, the fast path is usable.
This patch relies on previous patch "MINOR: time: export the global_now
variable" and must be backported as far as 1.8.
types/freq_ctr.h was moved to haproxy/freq_ctr-t.h and proto/freq_ctr.h
was moved to haproxy/freq_ctr.h. Files were updated accordingly, no other
change was applied.
