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While the capabilities of epoll cannot be fully exploited given
our primitive design; avoiding thundering herd wakeups on larger
SMP machines while below 100% utilization is possible with
Linux 4.5+.
With this change, only one worker wakes up per-connect(2)
(instead of all of them via select(2)), avoiding the thundering
herd effect when the system is mostly idle.
Saturated instances should not notice the difference if they
rarely had multiple workers sleeping in select(2). This change
benefits non-saturated instances.
With 2 parallel clients and 8 workers on a nominally (:P)
8-core CPU (AMD FX-8320), the uconnect.perl test script
invocation showed a reduction from ~3.4s to ~2.5s when
reading an 11-byte response body:
echo worker_processes 8 >u.conf.rb
bs=11 ruby -I lib -I test/ruby-2.5.5/ext/unicorn_http/ bin/unicorn \
test/benchmark/dd.ru -E none -l /tmp/u.sock -c u.conf.rb
time perl -I lib -w test/benchmark/uconnect.perl \
-n 100000 -c 2 /tmp/u.sock
Times improve less as "-c" increases for uconnect.perl (system
noise and timings are inconsistent). The benefit of this change
should be more noticeable on systems with more workers (and
more cores).
I wanted to use EPOLLET (Edge-Triggered) to further reduce
syscalls, here, (similar to the old select()-avoidance bet) but
that would've either added too much complexity to deduplicate
wakeup sources, or run into the same starvation problem we
solved in April 2020[1].
Since the kernel already has the complexity and deduplication
built-in for Level-Triggered epoll support, we'll just let the
kernel deal with it.
Note: do NOT take this as an example of how epoll should be used
in a sophisticated server. unicorn is primitive by design and
cannot use threads nor handle multiple clients at once, thus it
it only uses epoll in this extremely limited manner.
Linux 4.5+ users will notice a regression of one extra epoll FD
per-worker and at least two epoll watches, so
/proc/sys/fs/epoll/max_user_watches may need to be changed along
with RLIMIT_NOFILE.
This change has also been tested on Linux 3.10.x (CentOS 7.x)
and FreeBSD 11.x to ensure compatibility with systems without
EPOLLEXCLUSIVE.
Various EPOLLEXCLUSIVE discussions over the years:
https://yhbt.net/lore/lkml/?q=s:EPOLLEXCLUSIVE+d:..20211001&x=t&o=-1
[1] https://yhbt.net/unicorn-public/CAMBWrQ=Yh42MPtzJCEO7XryVknDNetRMuA87irWfqVuLdJmiBQ@mail.gmail.com/
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