Re: Cygwin multithreading performance

[Kacper Michajlow <kasper93 at gmail dot com>]

2015-12-05 11:51 GMT+01:00 Mark Geisert <mark@maxrnd.com>:
> Mark Geisert wrote:
>>
>> Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>>
>>> On Nov 23 16:54, Mark Geisert wrote:
>>>>
>>>> John Hein wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Mark Geisert wrote at 23:45 -0800 on Nov 22, 2015:
>>>>>   > Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>>>>   > > On Nov 21 01:21, Mark Geisert wrote:
>>>>>   > [...] so I wonder if there's
>>>>>   > >> some unintentional serialization going on somewhere, but I
>>>>> don't know yet
>>>>>   > >> how I could verify that theory.
>>>>>   > >
>>>>>   > > If I'm allowed to make an educated guess, the big serializer
>>>>> in Cygwin
>>>>>   > > are probably the calls to malloc, calloc, realloc, free.  We
>>>>> desperately
>>>>>   > > need a new malloc implementation better suited to
>>>>> multi-threading.
>>
>> [...]
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Someone recently mentioned on this list they were working on porting
>>>>> jemalloc.  That would be a good choice.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Indeed; thanks for the reminder.  Somehow I hadn't followed that thread.
>>>
>>>
>>> Indeed^2.  Did you look into the locking any further to see if there's
>>> more than one culprit?  I guess we've a rather long way to a "lock-less
>>> kernel"...
>
> [...]
>>
>> But that is just groundwork to identifying which locks are suffering the
>> most contention.  To identify them at source level I think I'll also
>> need to record the caller's RIP when they are being locked.
>
>
> In the OP's very good testcase the most heavily contended locks, by far, are
> those internal to git's builtin/pack-objects.c.  I plan to show actual stats
> after some more cleanup, but I did notice something in that git source file
> that might explain the difference between Cygwin and MinGW when running this
> testcase...
>
> #ifndef NO_PTHREADS
>
> static pthread_mutex_t read_mutex;
> #define read_lock()             pthread_mutex_lock(&read_mutex)
> #define read_unlock()           pthread_mutex_unlock(&read_mutex)
>
> static pthread_mutex_t cache_mutex;
> #define cache_lock()            pthread_mutex_lock(&cache_mutex)
> #define cache_unlock()          pthread_mutex_unlock(&cache_mutex)
>
> static pthread_mutex_t progress_mutex;
> #define progress_lock()         pthread_mutex_lock(&progress_mutex)
> #define progress_unlock()       pthread_mutex_unlock(&progress_mutex)
>
> #else
>
> #define read_lock()             (void)0
> #define read_unlock()           (void)0
> #define cache_lock()            (void)0
> #define cache_unlock()          (void)0
> #define progress_lock()         (void)0
> #define progress_unlock()       (void)0
>
> #endif
>
> Is it possible the MinGW version of git is compiled with NO_PTHREADS
> #defined?  If so, it would mean there's no locking being done at all and
> would explain the faster execution and near 100% CPU utilization when
> running under MinGW.

Nah, there is no threading enabled when there is no pthreads. How
would that work? :D See thread-utils.h

#ifndef NO_PTHREADS
#include <pthread.h>

extern int online_cpus(void);
extern int init_recursive_mutex(pthread_mutex_t*);

#else

#define online_cpus() 1

#endif


Looks like there is indeed a bug in git code when passing "--threads"
explicitly to "git pack-objects", because they show warning about
threads being unsupported, but doesn't overwrite delta_search_threads
value. I will go to git's ML about it. This is completely not related
to our issue.

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