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bundle2: increase payload part chunk size to 32kb
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Authored by indygreg on Jan 21 2018, 1:56 AM.

Details

Summary

Bundle2 payload parts are framed chunks. Esentially, we obtain
data in equal size chunks of size preferedchunksize and emit those
to a generator. That generator is fed into a compressor (which can
be the no-op compressor, which just re-emits the generator). And
the output from the compressor likely goes to a file descriptor
or socket.

What this means is that small chunk sizes create more Python objects
and Python function calls than larger chunk sizes. And as we know,
Python object and function call overhead in performance sensitive
code matters (at least with CPython).

This commit increases the bundle2 part payload chunk size from 4k
to 32k. Practically speaking, this means that the chunks we feed
into a compressor (implemented in C code) or feed directly into a
file handle or socket write() are larger. It's possible the chunks
might be larger than what the receiver can handle in one logical
operation. But at that point, we're in C code, which is much more
efficient at dealing with splitting up the chunk and making multiple
function calls than Python is.

A downside to larger chunks is that the receiver has to wait for that
much data to arrive (either raw or from a decompressor) before it
can process the chunk. But 32kb still feels like a small buffer to
have to wait for. And in many cases, the client will convert from
8 read(4096) to 1 read(32768). That's happening in Python land. So
we cut down on the number of Python objects and function calls,
making the client faster as well. I don't think there are any
significant concerns to increasing the payload chunk size to 32kb.

The impact of this change on performance significant. Using curl
to obtain a stream clone bundle2 payload from a server on localhost
serving the mozilla-unified repository:

before: 20.78 user; 7.71 system; 80.5 MB/s
after: 13.90 user; 3.51 system; 132 MB/s
legacy: 9.72 user; 8.16 system; 132 MB/s

bundle2 stream clone generation is still more resource intensive than
legacy stream clone (that's likely because of the use of a
util.chunkbuffer). But the throughput is the same. We might
be in territory we're this is effectively a benchmark of the
networking stack or Python's syscall throughput.

From the client perspective, hg clone -U --stream:

before: 33.50 user; 7.95 system; 53.3 MB/s
after: 22.82 user; 7.33 system; 72.7 MB/s
legacy: 29.96 user; 7.94 system; 58.0 MB/s

And for hg clone --stream with a working directory update of
~230k files:

after: 119.55 user; 26.47 system; 0:57.08 wall
legacy: 126.98 user; 26.94 system; 1:05.56 wall

So, it appears that bundle2's stream clone is now definitively faster
than legacy stream clone!

Diff Detail

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Event Timeline

indygreg created this revision.Jan 21 2018, 1:56 AM

The improvement seems nice for the stream but it might have unintended consequences on other network operations. Would it be possible to introduce a config knob to restore the old value or tune it later?

The improvement seems nice for the stream but it might have unintended consequences on other network operations. Would it be possible to introduce a config knob to restore the old value or tune it later?

I agree a commit knob would be useful. Could be done as a follow-up easily enough.

As to whether this will have an impact on other network operations, I'm skeptical. I'm pretty sure we already use 32kb chunks in other places. And, the SSH protocol today may not do any buffering, meaning that each chunk from the iterator gets turned into a socket.send(). That may be creating a ton of TCP overhead...

The improvement seems nice for the stream but it might have unintended consequences on other network operations. Would it be possible to introduce a config knob to restore the old value or tune it later?

If I'm understanding this right, it's a server-side-only change, so I'd rather defer the knob until we have a benchmark that shows this is detrimental.

indygreg updated this revision to Diff 4990.Jan 22 2018, 3:32 PM
durin42 accepted this revision.Jan 22 2018, 4:12 PM
This revision is now accepted and ready to land.Jan 22 2018, 4:12 PM
This revision was automatically updated to reflect the committed changes.