While this interface is usually pretty fast because it is a write and
forget operation, this has issues when there are multiple threads
hitting the perf map file at the same time. In particular this interface
becomes a bottleneck due to a locking mutex on writes in the kernel.
The situations when this bottleneck occurs is when a bunch of threads
get spawned and they are all jitting code as quickly as possible. In
particular Geekbench's clang benchmark hits this hard where each CPU
thread spends ~40% CPU time on all eight CPU threads because they are
stalled waiting for this mutex to unlock.
To work around this issue, buffer the writes a small amount. Either up
to a page-ish of data or 100ms of time. This completely eliminates
threads waiting on the kernel mutex.
- Around a page of buffer space was chosen by profiling Geekbench's
clang benchmark and seeing how frequently it was still writing.
- 1024 bytes was still fairly aggressive, 4096 seemed fine.
- 100ms was chosen to ensure we don't wait /too/ long to write JIT
symbols.
- In most cases 100ms is enough that you won't notice the blip in
perf.
One thing of note is that with profiling enabled and checking the time
on every JIT block still ends up with 2-3% CPUtime in vdso
clock_gettime. We can improve this by using the cyclecounter directly
since that is still guaranteed to be monotonic. Maybe we'll come back to
that if it is actually an issue here.
It is not an external component, and it makes paths needlessly long.
Ryan seemed amenable to this when we discussed on IRC earlier.
Signed-off-by: Alyssa Rosenzweig <alyssa@rosenzweig.io>
Paulo Matos