The rings were manually padded to place the various areas that compose
them into different cache lines, provided that the allocator returned
a cache-aligned address, which until now was not granted. By now
switching to the aligned API we can finally have this guarantee and
hope for more consistent ring performance between tests. Like previously
the few carefully crafted THREAD_PAD() could simply be replaced by
generic THREAD_ALIGN() that dictate the type's alignment.
This was the last user of THREAD_PAD() by the way.
At the moment it is not supported to produce multi-line events on the
"show events" output, simply because the LF character is used as the
default end-of-event mark. However it could be convenient to produce
well-formatted multi-line events, e.g. in JSON or other formats. UNIX
utilities have already faced similar needs in the past and added
"-print0" to "find" and "-0" to "xargs" to mention that the delimiter
is the NUL character. This makes perfect sense since it's never present
in contents, so let's do exactly the same here.
Thus from now on, "show events <ring> -0" will delimit messages using
a \0 instead of a \n, permitting a better and safer encapsulation.
Now the rings have one wait queue per group. This should limit the
contention on systems such as EPYC CPUs where the performance drops
dramatically when using more than one CCX.
Tests were run with different numbers and it was showed that value
6 outperforms all other ones at 12, 24, 48, 64 and 80 threads on an
EPYC, a Xeon and an Ampere CPU. Value 7 sometimes comes close and
anything around these values degrades quickly. The value has been
left tunable in the global section.
This commit only introduces everything needed to set up the queue count
so that it's easier to adjust it in the forthcoming patches, but it was
initially added after the series, making it harder to compare.
It was also shown that trying to group the threads in queues by their
thread groups is counter-productive and that it was more efficient to
do that by applying a modulo on the thread number. As surprising as it
seems, it does have the benefit of well balancing any number of threads.
It's inefficient and counter-productive that each ring writer iterates
over all readers to wake them up. Let's just have one in charge of this,
it strongly limits contention. The only thing is that since the thread
is iterating over a list, we want to be sure that if the first readers
have already completed their job, they will be woken up again. For this
we keep a counter of messages delivered after the wakeup started, and
the waking thread will check it before going back to sleep. In order to
avoid looping forever, it will also drop its waking flag soon enough to
possibly let another one take it.
There used to be a few cases of watchdogs before this on a 24-core AMD
EPYC platform on the list iteration those never appeared anymore.
The perf has dropped a bit on 3C6T on the EPYC, from 6.61 to 6.0M but
remains unchanged at 24C48T.
It was only used to protect the list which is now an mt_list so it
doesn't provide any required protection anymore. It obviously also
used to provide strict ordering between the writer and the reader
when the writer started to update the messages, but that's now
covered by the oredered tail updates and updates to the readers
count to protect the area.
The message rate on small thread counts (up to 12) saw a boost of
roughly 5% while on large counts while for large counts it lost
about 2% due to some contention now becoming visible elsewhere.
Typical measures are 6.13M -> 6.61M at 3C6T, and 1.88 -> 1.92M at
24C48T on the EPYC.
Rings are keeping a lock only for the list, which apparently doesn't
need anything more than an mt_list, so let's first turn it into that
before dropping the lock. There should be no visible effect.
We're now locking the tail while looking for some room in the ring. In
fact it's still while writing to it, but the goal definitely is to get
rid of the lock ASAP. For this we reserve the topmost bit of the tail
as a lock, which may have as a possible visible effect that buffers will
be limited to 2GB instead of 4GB on 32-bit machines (though in practise,
good luck for allocating more than 2GB contiguous on 32-bit), but in
practice since the size is read with atol() and some operating systems
limit it to LONG_MAX unless passing negative numbers, the limit is
already there.
For now the impact on x86_64 is significant (drop from 2.35 to 1.4M/s
on 48 threads on EPYC 24 cores) but this situation is only temporary
so that changes can be reviewable and bisectable.
Other approaches were attempted, such as using XCHG instead, which is
slightly faster on x86 with low thread counts (but causes more write
contention), and forces readers to stall under heavy traffic because
they can't access a valid value for the queue anymore. A CAS requires
preloading the value and is les good on ARMv8.1. XADD could also be
considered with 12-13 upper bits of the offset dedicated to locking,
but that looks overkill.
We really want to let the readers and writers act on different areas, so
we want to have the tail and the head on separate cache lines, themselves
separate from the rest of the ring. Doing so improves the performance from
2.15 to 2.35M msg/s at 48 threads on a 24-core EPYC.
This increases the header space from 32 to 192 bytes when threads are
enabled. But since we already have the header size available in the file,
haring remains able to detect the aligned vs unaligned formats and call
dump_v2a() when aligned is detected.
The purpose is to store a head and a tail that are independent so that
we can further improve the API to update them independently from each
other.
The struct was arranged like the original one so that as long as a ring
has its head set to zero (i.e. no recycling) it will continue to work.
The new format is already detectable thanks to the "rsvd" field which
indicates the number of reserved bytes at the beginning. It's located
where the buffer's area pointer previously was, so that older versions
of haring can continue to open the ring in repair mode, and newer ones
can use the fact that the upper bits of that variable are zero to guess
that it's working with the new format instead of the old one. Also let's
keep in mind that the layout will further change to place some alignment
constraints.
The haring tool will thus updated based on this and it detects that the
rsvd field is smaller than a page and that the sum of it with the size
equals the mapped size, in which case it uses the new dump_v2() function
instead of dump_v1(). The new function also creates a buffer from the
ring's area, size, head and tail and calls the generic one so that no
other code had to be adapted.
We'll need to add more complex structures in the ring, such as wait
queues. That's far too much to be stored into the area in case of
file-backed contents, so let's split the ring definition and its
storage once for all.
This patch introduces a struct ring_storage which is assigned to
ring->storage, which contains minimal information to represent the
storage layout, i.e. for now only the buffer, and all the rest
remains in the ring itself. The storage is appended immediately after
it and the buffer's pointer always points to that area. It has the
benefit of remaining 100% compatible with the existing file-backed
layout. In memory, the allocation loses the size of a struct buffer.
It's not even certain it's worth placing the size there, given that it's
constant and that a dump of a ring wouldn't really need it (the file size
is sufficient). But for now everything comes with the struct buffer, and
later this will change once split into head and tail. Also this area may
be completed with more information in the future (e.g. storage version,
format, endianness, word size etc).
Till now we used to rely on a heuristic pointer comparison to check if
a ring was mapped or allocated. Better assign a flag to clarify this
because it's going to become difficult otherwise.
In order to support concurrent writers we'll need to lock areas in the
buffer. For this we'll use one special value of the single-byte readers
count. Let's reserve it now and use the macro instead of the hardcoded
255.
Since the previous patch, the ring's offset is not used anymore. The
haring utility remains backward-compatible since it can trust the
buffer element that's at the beginning of the map and which still
contains all the valid data.
The ring watch flags (wait, seek end) were dangerously passed via ctx.cli.i0
from "show buf" in sink.c:cli_parse_show_events(), or implicitly reset in
"show errors". That's very unconvenient, difficult to follow, and prone to
short-term breakage.
Let's pass an extra argument to ring_attach_cli() to take these flags, now
defined in ring-t.h as RING_WF_*, and let the function set them itself
where appropriate (still ctx.cli.i0 for now).
There are list definitions everywhere in the code, let's drop the need
for including list-t.h to declare them. The rest of the list manipulation
is huge however and not needed everywhere so using the list walking macros
still requires to include list.h.
