view mercurial/worker.py @ 28181:f8efc8a3a991

worker: change partition strategy to every Nth element

The only consumer of the worker pool code today is `hg update`.

Previously, the algorithm to partition work to each worker process
preserved input list ordering. We'd take the first N elements, then
the next N elements, etc. Measurements on mozilla-central demonstrate
this isn't an optimal partitioning strategy.

I added debug code to print when workers were exiting. When performing
a working copy update on a previously empty working copy of
mozilla-central, I noticed that process lifetimes were all over the
map. One worker would complete after 7s. Many would complete after
12s. And another worker would often take >16s. This behavior occurred
for many worker process counts and was more pronounced on some than
others.

What I suspect is happening is some workers end up with lots of
small files and others with large files. This is because the update
code passes in actions according to sorted filenames. And, directories
under tend to accumulate similar files. For example, test directories
often consist of many small test files and media directories contain
binary (often larger) media files.

This patch changes the partitioning algorithm to select every Nth
element from the input list. Each worker thus has a similar composition
of files to operate on.

The result of this change is that worker processes now all tend to exit
around the same time. The possibility of a long pole due to being
unlucky and receiving all the large files has been mitigated. Overall
execution time seems to drop, but not by a statistically significant
amount on mozilla-central. However, repositories with directories
containing many large files will likely show a drop.

There shouldn't be any regressions due to partial manifest decoding
because the update code already iterates the manifest to determine
what files to operate on, so the manifest should already be decoded.

# worker.py - master-slave parallelism support
#
# Copyright 2013 Facebook, Inc.
#
# This software may be used and distributed according to the terms of the
# GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version.

from __future__ import absolute_import

import errno
import os
import signal
import sys
import threading

from .i18n import _
from . import error

def countcpus():
    '''try to count the number of CPUs on the system'''

    # posix
    try:
        n = int(os.sysconf('SC_NPROCESSORS_ONLN'))
        if n > 0:
            return n
    except (AttributeError, ValueError):
        pass

    # windows
    try:
        n = int(os.environ['NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS'])
        if n > 0:
            return n
    except (KeyError, ValueError):
        pass

    return 1

def _numworkers(ui):
    s = ui.config('worker', 'numcpus')
    if s:
        try:
            n = int(s)
            if n >= 1:
                return n
        except ValueError:
            raise error.Abort(_('number of cpus must be an integer'))
    return min(max(countcpus(), 4), 32)

if os.name == 'posix':
    _startupcost = 0.01
else:
    _startupcost = 1e30

def worthwhile(ui, costperop, nops):
    '''try to determine whether the benefit of multiple processes can
    outweigh the cost of starting them'''
    linear = costperop * nops
    workers = _numworkers(ui)
    benefit = linear - (_startupcost * workers + linear / workers)
    return benefit >= 0.15

def worker(ui, costperarg, func, staticargs, args):
    '''run a function, possibly in parallel in multiple worker
    processes.

    returns a progress iterator

    costperarg - cost of a single task

    func - function to run

    staticargs - arguments to pass to every invocation of the function

    args - arguments to split into chunks, to pass to individual
    workers
    '''
    if worthwhile(ui, costperarg, len(args)):
        return _platformworker(ui, func, staticargs, args)
    return func(*staticargs + (args,))

def _posixworker(ui, func, staticargs, args):
    rfd, wfd = os.pipe()
    workers = _numworkers(ui)
    oldhandler = signal.getsignal(signal.SIGINT)
    signal.signal(signal.SIGINT, signal.SIG_IGN)
    pids, problem = [], [0]
    for pargs in partition(args, workers):
        pid = os.fork()
        if pid == 0:
            signal.signal(signal.SIGINT, oldhandler)
            try:
                os.close(rfd)
                for i, item in func(*(staticargs + (pargs,))):
                    os.write(wfd, '%d %s\n' % (i, item))
                os._exit(0)
            except KeyboardInterrupt:
                os._exit(255)
                # other exceptions are allowed to propagate, we rely
                # on lock.py's pid checks to avoid release callbacks
        pids.append(pid)
    pids.reverse()
    os.close(wfd)
    fp = os.fdopen(rfd, 'rb', 0)
    def killworkers():
        # if one worker bails, there's no good reason to wait for the rest
        for p in pids:
            try:
                os.kill(p, signal.SIGTERM)
            except OSError as err:
                if err.errno != errno.ESRCH:
                    raise
    def waitforworkers():
        for _pid in pids:
            st = _exitstatus(os.wait()[1])
            if st and not problem[0]:
                problem[0] = st
                killworkers()
    t = threading.Thread(target=waitforworkers)
    t.start()
    def cleanup():
        signal.signal(signal.SIGINT, oldhandler)
        t.join()
        status = problem[0]
        if status:
            if status < 0:
                os.kill(os.getpid(), -status)
            sys.exit(status)
    try:
        for line in fp:
            l = line.split(' ', 1)
            yield int(l[0]), l[1][:-1]
    except: # re-raises
        killworkers()
        cleanup()
        raise
    cleanup()

def _posixexitstatus(code):
    '''convert a posix exit status into the same form returned by
    os.spawnv

    returns None if the process was stopped instead of exiting'''
    if os.WIFEXITED(code):
        return os.WEXITSTATUS(code)
    elif os.WIFSIGNALED(code):
        return -os.WTERMSIG(code)

if os.name != 'nt':
    _platformworker = _posixworker
    _exitstatus = _posixexitstatus

def partition(lst, nslices):
    '''partition a list into N slices of roughly equal size

    The current strategy takes every Nth element from the input. If
    we ever write workers that need to preserve grouping in input
    we should consider allowing callers to specify a partition strategy.
    '''
    for i in range(nslices):
        yield lst[i::nslices]