Task started out as a self-organizing parallel-make algorithm, but ended
up becoming a half-broken wait-die algorithm. When a contended object
is already locked, Tasks enter a FIFO queue to restart and acquire the
lock. This is the "die" part of wait-die (all locks on an Exclusion are
non-blocking, so no Task ever does "wait"). The lock queue is FIFO wrt
_lock acquisition order_, not _Task age_ as required by the wait-die
algorithm.
Make it a 25%-broken wait-die algorithm by sorting the Tasks on lock
queues in order of Task ID, i.e. oldest-first, or FIFO wrt Task age.
This ensures the oldest Task waiting for an object is the one to get
it when it becomes available, as expected from the wait-die algorithm.
This should reduce the amount of time Tasks spend on the execution queue,
and reduce memory usage by avoiding the accumulation of Tasks that cannot
make forward progress.
Note that turning `TaskQueue` into an ordered container would have
undesirable side-effects:
* `std::list` has some useful properties wrt stability of object
location and cost of splicing. Other containers may not have these,
and `std::list` does have a `sort` method.
* Some Task objects are created at the beginning and reused continually,
but we really do want those Tasks to be executed in FIFO order wrt
submission, not Task ID. We can exclude these tasks by only doing the
sorting when a Task is queued for an Exclusin object.
Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>
Add a second level queue which is only serviced when the local and global
queues are empty.
At some point there might be a need to implement a full priority queue,
but for now two classes are sufficient.
Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>
try_lock allows specification of a different Task to be run instead of
the current Task when the lock is busy.
Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>
It turns out I've been using pthread_setname_np wrong the whole time:
* on Linux, the thread name length is 15 characters.
TASK_COMM_LEN is 16 bytes, and the last one is always 0.
This is now hardcoded in many places and cannot be changed.
* pthread_setname_np doesn't return -errno, so DIE_IF_MINUS_ERRNO
was the wrong macro. On the other hand, we never want to do anything
differently when pthread_setname_np fails, so we never needed to
check the return value.
Also, libc silently ignores attempts to set the thread name when it is too
long. That's almost certainly a libc bug, but libc probably suppresses
the error result for the same reasons I ignore the error result.
Wrap the pthread_setname function with a C++ std::string overload that
truncates the argument at 15 characters, so we at least get the first
part of the task name in the thread name field. Later commits can deal
with making the bees thread names shorter.
Also wrap pthread_getname for symmetry.
Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>
pause(true) stops the TaskMaster from processing any more Tasks,
but does not destroy any queued Tasks.
pause(false) re-enables Task processing.
Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>
Exclusion was generating a new Task every time a lock was contended.
That results in thousands of empty Task objects which contain a single
Task item.
Get rid of ExclusionState. Exclusion is now a simple weak_ptr to a Task.
If the weak_ptr is expired, the Exclusion is unlocked. If the weak_ptr
is not expired, it points to the Task which owns the Exclusion.
try_lock now appends the Task attempting to lock the Exclusion directly
to the owning Task, eliminating the need for Exclusion to have one.
This also removes the need to call insert_task separately, though
insert_task remains for other use cases.
With no ExclusionState there is no need for a string argument to
Exclusion's constructor, so get rid of that too.
Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>
Make one class Barrier which is copiable, so we don't have to
have users making shared Barrier all the time.
Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>
Task::run() would schedule a new execution of Task, unless it was waiting
on a queue for execution. This cannot be implemented with a bool,
since a Task might be included in multiple queues, and should still be
in waiting state even when executed in that case.
Replace the bool with a counter. run() and append() (but not
append_nolock) increment the counter, exec() decrements the counter.
If the counter is non-zero when run() or append() is called, the Task
is not scheduled.
Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>
This is a simple lightweight counter that tracks the number of Task
objects that exist. Useful for leak detection.
Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>
Quite often we want to execute task B after task A finishes executing,
especially if tasks A and B attempt to acquire locks on the same objects.
Implement that capability in Task directly: each Task holds a queue
of Tasks which will be executed strictly after this Task has finished
executing, or if the Task is destroyed.
Add a local queue to each TaskConsumer. This queue contains a list
of Tasks which are to be executed by a single thread in sequential
order. These tasks are executed before fetching any tasks from
TaskMaster.
Each time a Task finishes executing, the list of tasks appended to the
recently executed Task are spliced at the beginning of the thread's
TaskConsumer local queue. These tasks will be executed in the same
thread in the same order they were appended to the recently executed Task.
If a Task is destroyed with a post-execution queue, that queue is
also inserted at the front of the current TaskConsumer's local queue.
If a Task is destroyed or somehow executed outside of a TaskConsumer
thread, or a TaskConsumer thread is destroyed, the local queue of Tasks
is wrapped in a "rescue_task" Task, and spliced before the head of the
global queue. This preserves the sequential ordering of tasks.
In all cases the order of sequential execution of Tasks that are
appended to another Task is preserved.
The unused queue insertion functions are removed.
Exclusion is now simply a mutex, a bool, and a Task with an empty
function. Tasks that queue up waiting for the mutex are stored in
Exclusion's Task, and Exclusion simply runs that task when the
ExclusionState is released.
Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>
This is especially useful when dynamic load management allocates more
worker threads than active tasks, so the extra threads are effectively
invisible.
Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>
Enable much simpler Task management: each time a Task needs to be done
at least once in the future, simply invoke the run() method on the Task.
The Task will ensure that it only runs once, only appears in a queue
once, and will run again if a run request is made while the Task is
already running.
Make the queue policy a member of the Task rather than a method. This
enables Tasks to reschedule themselves, possibly on the appropriate queue
if we have more than one of those some day.
This happens to make Tasks more similar to Linux kernel workers.
This similarity is coincidental, but not undesirable.
Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>
Add a method to have TaskMaster discard any entries in its queue, terminate
all worker threads, and prevent any new Tasks from being queued.
Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>
The -g option limits the number of worker threads when the target load
average is exceeded. On some systems the load normally runs high, and
continuous bees operation is required to avoid running out of disk space.
Add a -G/--thread-min option to force at least some threads to continue
running.
Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>
Add -g / --loadavg-target parameter to track system load and add or
remove bees worker threads dynamically to keep system load close to the
loadavg target. Thread count may vary from zero to the maximum
specified by -c or -C, and is adjusted every 5 seconds.
This is better than implementing a similar load average scheme from
outside of the process (though that is still possible) because the
in-process load tracker does not disrupt the performance timing feedback
mechanisms as a freezer cgroup or SIGSTOP would when controlling bees
from outside. The internal load average tracker can also adjust the
number of active threads while an external tracker can only choose from
the maximum or zero.
Also fix a bug where a Task could deadlock waiting for itself to exit
if it tries to insert a new Task after the number of worker threads has
been set to zero.
Also correct usage message for --scan-mode (values are 0..2) since
we are touching adjacent lines anyway.
Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>
The default constructor makes it more convenient to use Task as a
class member.
The ID is useful to disambiguate Task references.
Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>
Since we are now unconditionally rendering the print_fn as a static
string, there is no need for it to be a function. We also need it to
be brief and mostly constant.
Use a string instead. Put the string before the function in the Task
constructor arguments so that the title string appears as a heading in
code, since we are making a breaking API change already.
Drop TASK_MACRO as it is broken by this change, but there is no similar
usage of Task anywhere to make it worth fixing.
Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>
This enables bees' thread introspection to use task descriptions in
status and log messages.
BeesNote will be calling Task::current_task() from non-Task contexts,
which means we need to allow Task's shared state pointer to be null.
Remove some asserts that will ruin our day in that case.
Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>
We need a mechanism for distributing work across processor cores and
disks.
Task implements a simple FIFO/LIFO queue model for executing closures.
Some locking primitives are included (mutex and barrier).
Signed-off-by: Zygo Blaxell <bees@furryterror.org>
