Memory allocation overhead

[Colin Paul Adams]

I've spent the last three weekends making a serious attempt to get to
the bottom of the problem of quadratic performance in gexslt that has
been present ever since I first successfully ran an identity
transformation back in 2004.

I used the profiler in EiffelStudio 6.1 (a run that normally last 71
minutes when compiled with gec takes about 14 hours when compiled with
ISE 6.1 with the profiler on), and spent lots of time
following false leads (the report gives exact numbers for routine
calls, which is very useful, and nonsense for time spent e.g. 873.49%
for one routine, which is definitely not useful).

By this morning I had concluded there was nothing in my code that
could explain the results seen - or at least, if there was, I wasn't
going to be able to find it using the EiffelStudio profiler.

So I edited $GOBO/tool/gec/config/c/gcc.cfg to write out profiling
information for gprof (Eric, when can we have the setting of cflags
and lflags in system.xace?). The resulting runtime was 118 minutes - a
much more acceptable overhead. And the resulting report from gprof is
highly illuminating. here follows the first few lines:

Each sample counts as 0.01 seconds.
  %   cumulative   self              self     total          
 time   seconds   seconds    calls   s/call   s/call  name    
 36.58   2943.00  2943.00                             GC_mark_from
 16.32   4256.06  1313.06                             GC_header_cache_miss
 13.18   5316.64  1060.58                             GC_mark_local
 10.57   6166.79   850.15                             GC_steal_mark_stack
  4.32   6514.36   347.57                             GC_add_to_black_list_stack
  1.55   6639.04   124.68                             GC_push_marked
  1.26   6740.27   101.23                             GC_find_header
  1.22   6838.10    97.83                             GC_reclaim_clear
  1.10   6926.51    88.41                             GC_do_local_mark
  0.82   6992.39    65.88                             GC_generic_malloc_many
  0.64   7044.16    51.77                             GC_block_was_dirty
  0.63   7095.09    50.93                             GC_install_header
  0.58   7141.48    46.39                             GC_apply_to_all_blocks
  0.47   7179.41    37.93                             GC_build_fl
  0.44   7214.44    35.03 530952040     0.00     0.00  T122f10
  0.40   7246.41    31.97                             GC_allochblk_nth
  0.29   7269.71    23.30                             GC_enclosing_mapping
  0.26   7290.70    20.99 262713928     0.00     0.00  T506f27
  0.25   7311.07    20.37                             GC_malloc
  0.25   7331.32    20.25 127354522     0.00     0.00  T162x16589
  0.22   7348.82    17.50                             GC_free_block_ending_at
  0.22   7366.13    17.31                             GC_malloc_atomic
  0.20   7382.11    15.99 3529690218     0.00     0.00  T240f8
  0.19   7397.55    15.44                             GC_reclaim_block
  0.18   7412.41    14.86                             GC_reclaim_uninit
  0.18   7427.16    14.75 529087403     0.00     0.00  T57f9
  0.18   7441.84    14.68 529541505     0.00     0.00  T15f4
  0.13   7452.31    10.47 2030496041     0.00     0.00  T240c7
  0.11   7461.08     8.77 105048154     0.00     0.00  T27f8
  0.10   7469.40     8.32 2049701317     0.00     0.00  GE_new239
  0.10   7477.42     8.02 7679890135     0.00     0.00  GE_check_null
  0.10   7485.32     7.90 172970992     0.00     0.00  T772f27p1
  0.10   7493.20     7.88 2049636054     0.00     0.00  GE_new240

in short, almost all the run time is for memory management (this did
not surprise me as typically I see the program using 125-290% CPU - I
have a quad-core processor, so fully utilized = 400% - and I
configured the boehm-gc for parallel marking).

Now my problem is what to do about it (incidentally T122f10 is
{DS_ARRAYED_LIST}.item - nothing very surprising about that either, I
guess.). Does anyone have any suggested approaches?
--
Colin Adams
Preston Lancashire

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[Eric Bezault]

Colin Paul Adams wrote:
> So I edited $GOBO/tool/gec/config/c/gcc.cfg to write out profiling
> information for gprof (Eric, when can we have the setting of cflags
> and lflags in system.xace?).

It's already implemented as far as I know:

    <option name="c_compiler_options" value="..."/>
    <option name="link" value="..."/>

> Now my problem is what to do about it (incidentally T122f10 is
> {DS_ARRAYED_LIST}.item - nothing very surprising about that either, I
> guess.). Does anyone have any suggested approaches?

You can try reducing the amount of garbage generated, and hence
put less stress on the GC. I try to do that on all the Gobo tools,
even gec. This is one of my primary goals during the design phase.
The net advantage is that these tools can run even without the GC.

--
Eric Bezault
mailto:ericb@...
http://www.gobosoft.com

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[Emmanuel Stapf [ES]]

> I used the profiler in EiffelStudio 6.1 (a run that normally
> last 71 minutes when compiled with gec takes about 14 hours
> when compiled with ISE 6.1 with the profiler on), and spent

You should not enable profiler on all classes but just on yours. Then you
see much quickly where the bottleneck is on your code rather than trying to
profile STRING/ARRAY/ and other basic stuff which is not going to help you
much. Once you have identified the bottleneck you can try reduce the scope
of profiling to just the bottleneck.

Manu


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[Eric Bezault]

Colin Paul Adams wrote:
> Now my problem is what to do about it (incidentally T122f10 is
> {DS_ARRAYED_LIST}.item - nothing very surprising about that either, I
> guess.). Does anyone have any suggested approaches?

Can you send me the C code generated for T122f10? I don't understand
how we can have 35 seconds self and 7214 seconds cumulative. Unless
its thread is blocked when the GC is doing something special on its
own thread.

--
Eric Bezault
mailto:ericb@...
http://www.gobosoft.com

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[Eric Bezault]

Colin Paul Adams wrote:

>>>>>> "Eric" == Eric Bezault <ericb@...> writes:
>
>     Eric> Can you send me the C code generated for T122f10? I don't
>     Eric> understand how we can have 35 seconds self and 7214 seconds
>     Eric> cumulative. Unless its thread is blocked when the GC is
>     Eric> doing something special on its own thread.
>
>
> /* DS_ARRAYED_LIST [INTEGER_32].item */
> T6 T122f10(T0* C, T6 a1)
> {
> T6 R = 0;
> R = (((T112*)(GE_void(((T122*)(C))->a2)))->z2[a1]);
> return R;
> }
>

Hmmm, unless you have calls-on-void-target, GE_void is a macro
that does not call another function:

#define GE_void  (!(obj)?GE_check_void(obj):(obj))

So T122f10 does not call any other C function. So I would believe
that the values for self and cumulative should be the same.
The only explanation that I can think of is that the GC thread
is blocking the other thread while executing T12f10. I know
nothing about threads, and even less about how it works in the
Boehm GC, so what I just said might be completely stupid.

--
Eric Bezault
mailto:ericb@...
http://www.gobosoft.com

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[Colin Paul Adams]

>>>>> "Eric" == Eric Bezault <ericb@...> writes:

    Eric> You can try reducing the amount of garbage generated

So as an example, in XM_XPATH_STATIC_PROPERTY, I have four ARRAY
[BOOLEAN] which are included in every expression. Presumably it would
be much cheaper to remove the booleans from the arrays (I can't think
why I put them in ARRAYs in the first place).
--
Colin Adams
Preston Lancashire

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[Colin Paul Adams]

>>>>> "Colin" == Colin Paul Adams <colin@...> writes:

>>>>> "Eric" == Eric Bezault <ericb@...> writes:
    Eric> You can try reducing the amount of garbage generated

    Colin> So as an example, in XM_XPATH_STATIC_PROPERTY, I have four
    Colin> ARRAY [BOOLEAN] which are included in every
    Colin> expression. Presumably it would be much cheaper to remove
    Colin> the booleans from the arrays (I can't think why I put them
    Colin> in ARRAYs in the first place).

This seems very productive. I changed the first two arrays to be just
a series of BOOLEANs, and the runtime came down from 71 minutes to 50
minutes (my target is sub-one-minute, so there's a way to go, but it's
a good start).

So I'll do the other two ARRAYs next.

Another possibility is actually  to merge all the BOOLEANs as a
bit-field. This will save memory but not the number of objects, so I'm
not really interested in doing this. It might hurt performance.

But I'm interested in what approaches/techniques you use to avoid
extra allocations.

Do you use free at all? Obviously that won't reduce the number of
allocations, but it will reduce the number of objects the GC has to
deal with. Does it give any advantage over assigning Void to the
reference?

Expanded attributes? This implies having default_create as a creation
procedure, whereas the Gobo standard is to have an empty make.

Another possibility is to avoid OO techniques. For instance, I know
from last weekend's profiling that there is a VERY large number of
XM_XPATH_UNTYPED_ATOMIC_VALUE objects created by conversion from
XM_XPATH_STRING_VALUE. Untyped-atomic is XPath's coercible data
type. Although untyped-atomic does not inherit from xs:string in the
XPath type hierarchy, I have implemented XM_XPATH_UNTYPED_ATOMIC_VALUE
as inheriting from XM_XPATH_STRING_VALUE for convenience, as they are
nearly identical excpet for the coercing behaviour. So a clear saving
could be made by merging the two classes with a BOOLEAN to indicate
which type is actualy meant. Then the coercion to xs:string is simply
implemented by flipping the BOOLEAN. I suspect this is going to be a
big saving, but it is very anti-OO.
--
Colin Adams
Preston Lancashire

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[Eric Bezault]

Colin Paul Adams wrote:
> But I'm interested in what approaches/techniques you use to avoid
> extra allocations.
>
> Do you use free at all? Obviously that won't reduce the number of
> allocations, but it will reduce the number of objects the GC has to
> deal with. Does it give any advantage over assigning Void to the
> reference?

I don't use free.

> Expanded attributes? This implies having default_create as a creation
> procedure, whereas the Gobo standard is to have an empty make.

I don't use expanded.

> Another possibility is to avoid OO techniques. For instance, I know
> from last weekend's profiling that there is a VERY large number of
> XM_XPATH_UNTYPED_ATOMIC_VALUE objects created by conversion from
> XM_XPATH_STRING_VALUE. Untyped-atomic is XPath's coercible data
> type. Although untyped-atomic does not inherit from xs:string in the
> XPath type hierarchy, I have implemented XM_XPATH_UNTYPED_ATOMIC_VALUE
> as inheriting from XM_XPATH_STRING_VALUE for convenience, as they are
> nearly identical excpet for the coercing behaviour. So a clear saving
> could be made by merging the two classes with a BOOLEAN to indicate
> which type is actualy meant. Then the coercion to xs:string is simply
> implemented by flipping the BOOLEAN. I suspect this is going to be a
> big saving, but it is very anti-OO.

This might be the kind of things I could use indeed. Otherwise I try
to be very careful with strings. String concatenations and substring
operations create a lot of intermediary objects. Be careful as well
when strings get resized (even implicitly by some operations). Likewise
with DS_ARRAYED_... classes: try to create them with a capacity which
is not too big but not too small to avoid too many resizings. I know,
it's often not easy to choose the best capacity at creation time!
I also try to share objects as much as possible. Of course, when
shared, we have to be very careful that these objects don't have
their state modified. When that happens, then we need to clone it
beforehand. I use a lot of shared objects for the tokens when generating
the ASTs in gec. Another technique that I use is to try to reuse
objects, rather than giving them back to the GC and creating new
ones right after. In gec, I have AST visitor classes to implement
the different Eiffel "Degree" compilation passes. They all try to
keep the intermediary objects that they need to process a given
imput class. They reuse these intermediary objects when processing
the next input class, and so forth. I probably use other techniques,
but it's already a good start. One thing to remember is that when an
implementation technique is not "very" OO, try at least to make it
look as if it was OO in the class interface.

--
Eric Bezault
mailto:ericb@...
http://www.gobosoft.com

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[d.tuser]

Eric Bezault wrote:

> Colin Paul Adams wrote:
>  
>> But I'm interested in what approaches/techniques you use to avoid
>> extra allocations.
>>
>> Do you use free at all? Obviously that won't reduce the number of
>> allocations, but it will reduce the number of objects the GC has to
>> deal with. Does it give any advantage over assigning Void to the
>> reference?
>>    
>
> I don't use free.
>
>  
>> Expanded attributes? This implies having default_create as a creation
>> procedure, whereas the Gobo standard is to have an empty make.
>>    
>
> I don't use expanded.
>
>  
>> Another possibility is to avoid OO techniques. For instance, I know
>> from last weekend's profiling that there is a VERY large number of
>> XM_XPATH_UNTYPED_ATOMIC_VALUE objects created by conversion from
>> XM_XPATH_STRING_VALUE. Untyped-atomic is XPath's coercible data
>> type. Although untyped-atomic does not inherit from xs:string in the
>> XPath type hierarchy, I have implemented XM_XPATH_UNTYPED_ATOMIC_VALUE
>> as inheriting from XM_XPATH_STRING_VALUE for convenience, as they are
>> nearly identical excpet for the coercing behaviour. So a clear saving
>> could be made by merging the two classes with a BOOLEAN to indicate
>> which type is actualy meant. Then the coercion to xs:string is simply
>> implemented by flipping the BOOLEAN. I suspect this is going to be a
>> big saving, but it is very anti-OO.
>>    
>
> This might be the kind of things I could use indeed. Otherwise I try
> to be very careful with strings. String concatenations and substring
> operations create a lot of intermediary objects. Be careful as well
> when strings get resized (even implicitly by some operations). Likewise
> with DS_ARRAYED_... classes: try to create them with a capacity which
> is not too big but not too small to avoid too many resizings. I know,
> it's often not easy to choose the best capacity at creation time!
> I also try to share objects as much as possible. Of course, when
> shared, we have to be very careful that these objects don't have
> their state modified. When that happens, then we need to clone it
> beforehand. I use a lot of shared objects for the tokens when generating
> the ASTs in gec. Another technique that I use is to try to reuse
> objects, rather than giving them back to the GC and creating new
> ones right after. In gec, I have AST visitor classes to implement
> the different Eiffel "Degree" compilation passes. They all try to
> keep the intermediary objects that they need to process a given
> imput class. They reuse these intermediary objects when processing
> the next input class, and so forth. I probably use other techniques,
> but it's already a good start. One thing to remember is that when an
> implementation technique is not "very" OO, try at least to make it
> look as if it was OO in the class interface

This kind of information is very interesting in my opinion. But I never
read something comparable. I am not sure if you have a long term plan to
use http://gobo-eiffel.wiki.sourceforge.net/, but I would be willing to
publish it there. Is that ok?

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[Eric Bezault]

Daniel Tuser wrote:
> This kind of information is very interesting in my opinion. But I never
> read something comparable. I am not sure if you have a long term plan to
> use http://gobo-eiffel.wiki.sourceforge.net/, but I would be willing to
> publish it there. Is that ok?

I'm not a big fan of Wikis, so I have no long term plan to use
the Gobo project Wiki. I'm fine if Gobo users want to use this
space to publish Gobo related information. So feel free to use
it.

--
Eric Bezault
mailto:ericb@...
http://www.gobosoft.com

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[Colin Paul Adams]

>>>>> "Eric" == Eric Bezault <ericb@...> writes:

    >> Another possibility is to avoid OO techniques. For instance, I
    >> know from last weekend's profiling that there is a VERY large
    >> number of XM_XPATH_UNTYPED_ATOMIC_VALUE objects created by
    >> conversion from XM_XPATH_STRING_VALUE. Untyped-atomic is
    >> XPath's coercible data type. Although untyped-atomic does not
    >> inherit from xs:string in the XPath type hierarchy, I have
    >> implemented XM_XPATH_UNTYPED_ATOMIC_VALUE as inheriting from
    >> XM_XPATH_STRING_VALUE for convenience, as they are nearly
    >> identical excpet for the coercing behaviour. So a clear saving
    >> could be made by merging the two classes with a BOOLEAN to
    >> indicate which type is actualy meant. Then the coercion to
    >> xs:string is simply implemented by flipping the BOOLEAN. I
    >> suspect this is going to be a big saving, but it is very
    >> anti-OO.

    Eric> This might be the kind of things I could use
    Eric> indeed.

It helped, although not as dramatically as eliminating my ARRAY
[BOOLEAN]s. Eliminating these 4 arrays takes the time down from 71 minutes
to 30 minutes. This change to the untyped atomic values brings it
further down to 22 minutes.

    Eric> Another
    Eric> technique that I use is to try to reuse objects, rather than
    Eric> giving them back to the GC and creating new ones right
    Eric> after. In gec, I have AST visitor classes to implement the
    Eric> different Eiffel "Degree" compilation passes. They all try
    Eric> to keep the intermediary objects that they need to process a
    Eric> given imput class. They reuse these intermediary objects
    Eric> when processing the next input class, and so forth.

Presumably you can only do this because you know when you have
finished with an object, and don't have to rely on the garbage
collector working out when it can free memory.

I don't know how many such cases I am likely to find. If I do, then
perhaps there is the possibility of doing memory pooling - allocating
a single chunk of memory for a large number of identical objects.

I'm not sure how to go about that in Eiffel. I would guess that if I
have a reference class C, with default_create as a creation procedure
(is that necessary?) then if I create an ARRAY [expanded C] the memory
will all be claimed in one call to malloc. Then if I can get a
reference to one of these objects (how do I do that in Eiffel?), I can
call the real creation procedure (it will need to be exported to the
calling class) to initialize the referenced expanded object. I then
just have to keep track of free slots for reusing the memory.
--
Colin Adams
Preston Lancashire

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[Colin Paul Adams]

>>>>> "Eric" == Eric Bezault <ericb@...> writes:

    Eric> Otherwise I try to be very careful with
    Eric> strings. String concatenations and substring operations
    Eric> create a lot of intermediary objects. Be careful as well
    Eric> when strings get resized (even implicitly by some
    Eric> operations).

Is there a more efficient way of doing this sort of thing?

   a_preceding_path := parent.path
    if STRING_.same_string (a_preceding_path, "/") then
        Result := STRING_.concat (a_preceding_path, node_name)
    else
        Result := STRING_.concat (a_preceding_path, "/")
        Result := STRING_.appended_string (Result, node_name)
        Result := STRING_.appended_string (Result, "[")
        Result := STRING_.appended_string (Result, simple_number)
        Result := STRING_.appended_string (Result, "]")
    end
--
Colin Adams
Preston Lancashire

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[Lothar Scholz]

Hello Colin,

Friday, March 28, 2008, 7:50:06 PM, you wrote:

>>>>>> "Eric" == Eric Bezault <ericb@...> writes:

CPA>     Eric> Otherwise I try to be very careful with
CPA>     Eric> strings. String concatenations and substring operations
CPA>     Eric> create a lot of intermediary objects. Be careful as well
CPA>     Eric> when strings get resized (even implicitly by some
CPA>     Eric> operations).

CPA> Is there a more efficient way of doing this sort of thing?

CPA>    a_preceding_path := parent.path
CPA>     if STRING_.same_string (a_preceding_path, "/") then
CPA>         Result := STRING_.concat (a_preceding_path, node_name)
CPA>     else
CPA>         Result := STRING_.concat (a_preceding_path, "/")
CPA>         Result := STRING_.appended_string (Result, node_name)
CPA>         Result := STRING_.appended_string (Result, "[")
CPA>         Result := STRING_.appended_string (Result, simple_number)
CPA>         Result := STRING_.appended_string (Result, "]")
CPA>     end

Exactly for this reason some java compilers have a special optimization
inside the code generator when it detects sequences of strings
concatenations. It's just a to important operation.


--
Best regards,
 Lothar                            mailto:llothar@...


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[Colin Paul Adams]

>>>>> "Lothar" == Lothar Scholz <llothar@...> writes:

    Lothar> Exactly for this reason some java compilers have a special
    Lothar> optimization inside the code generator when it detects
    Lothar> sequences of strings concatenations. It's just a to
    Lothar> important operation.

so what do they do about it?
--
Colin Adams
Preston Lancashire

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[Berend de Boer]

>>>>> "Colin" == Colin Paul Adams <colin@...> writes:

>>>>> "Eric" == Eric Bezault <ericb@...> writes:
    Colin> Is there a more efficient way of doing this sort of thing?

Perhaps we should have:

  STRING_.concat(<<once "1", once "2", once "3", once "4">>)

Strings are indeed somewhat trouble in Eiffel. Although the default case
is safe, immutable strings and syntactic sugar for efficient string
concatenations would have been nice.

--
Cheers,

Berend de Boer


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[Lothar Scholz]

Hello Colin,

Saturday, March 29, 2008, 2:07:09 AM, you wrote:

>>>>>> "Lothar" == Lothar Scholz <