[Openmcl-devel] native threads

[David McClain]

I have spent more than a decade implementing various versions of Actors systems. Some were along the lines you describe, launching native threads to perform the work of Actors.

I finally concluded that, having just run a good race, you ought not kill the race horses, but rather retire them to the stable for another race. IOW, I now use thread pools, permanently launched and waiting for dispatch to another task. Thread startup entails a huge amount of overhead - allocating stack space and CPU registers, registering with OS, etc.

- DM

> On Jan 5, 2024, at 07:32, Taoufik Dachraoui <dachraoui.taoufik at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> why ccl is much slower?
> 
> taoufik at Ankbot:~/workspace/ccl/actor$ sbcl
> This is SBCL 2.3.11, an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp.
> More information about SBCL is available at <http://www.sbcl.org/>.
> 
> SBCL is free software, provided as is, with absolutely no warranty.
> It is mostly in the public domain; some portions are provided under
> BSD-style licenses.  See the CREDITS and COPYING files in the
> distribution for more information.
> * (time (prog1 t (loop for i from 0 upto 100000000 collect i)))
> Evaluation took:
>   1.379 seconds of real time
>   1.379015 seconds of total run time (0.856185 user, 0.522830 system)
>   [ Real times consist of 1.143 seconds GC time, and 0.236 seconds non-GC time. ]
>   [ Run times consist of 1.146 seconds GC time, and 0.234 seconds non-GC time. ]
>   100.00% CPU
>   2,913,031,106 processor cycles
>   1,600,427,200 bytes consed
>   
> T
> * (quit)
> taoufik at Ankbot:~/workspace/ccl/actor$ ccl
> Clozure Common Lisp Version 1.12.1 (v1.12.1-22-g6b1f1d3a) LinuxX8664
> 
> For more information about CCL, please see http://ccl.clozure.com <http://ccl.clozure.com/>.
> 
> CCL is free software.  It is distributed under the terms of the Apache
> Licence, Version 2.0.
> ? (time (prog1 t (loop for i from 0 upto 100000000 collect i)))
> (PROG1 T (LOOP FOR I FROM 0 UPTO 100000000 COLLECT I))
> took 11,946,514 microseconds (11.946514 seconds) to run.
>      11,147,722 microseconds (11.147722 seconds, 93.31%) of which was spent in GC.
> During that period, and with 24 available CPU cores,
>      11,632,370 microseconds (11.632370 seconds) were spent in user mode
>         292,428 microseconds ( 0.292428 seconds) were spent in system mode
>  1,600,000,032 bytes of memory allocated.
>  397,400 minor page faults, 0 major page faults, 0 swaps.
> T
> ? 
> 
> On Fri, Jan 5, 2024 at 3:28 PM Taoufik Dachraoui <dachraoui.taoufik at gmail.com <mailto:dachraoui.taoufik at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> It looks like it is not because of the threads:
>> 
>> taoufik at Ankbot:~/workspace/ccl/actor$ sbcl
>> This is SBCL 2.3.11, an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp.
>> More information about SBCL is available at <http://www.sbcl.org/>.
>> 
>> SBCL is free software, provided as is, with absolutely no warranty.
>> It is mostly in the public domain; some portions are provided under
>> BSD-style licenses.  See the CREDITS and COPYING files in the
>> distribution for more information.
>> * (time (reduce #'+ (loop for i from 0 upto 100000000 collect i)))
>> Evaluation took:
>>   1.836 seconds of real time
>>   1.835223 seconds of total run time (1.351394 user, 0.483829 system)
>>   [ Real times consist of 1.184 seconds GC time, and 0.652 seconds non-GC time. ]
>>   [ Run times consist of 1.184 seconds GC time, and 0.652 seconds non-GC time. ]
>>   99.95% CPU
>>   3,876,850,246 processor cycles
>>   1,600,427,200 bytes consed
>>   
>> 5000000050000000
>> * taoufik at Ankbot:~/workspace/ccl/actor$ ccl
>> Clozure Common Lisp Version 1.12.1 (v1.12.1-22-g6b1f1d3a) LinuxX8664
>> 
>> For more information about CCL, please see http://ccl.clozure.com <http://ccl.clozure.com/>.
>> 
>> CCL is free software.  It is distributed under the terms of the Apache
>> Licence, Version 2.0.
>> ? (time (reduce #'+ (loop for i from 0 upto 100000000 collect i)))
>> (REDUCE #'+ (LOOP FOR I FROM 0 UPTO 100000000 COLLECT I))
>> took 13,091,079 microseconds (13.091079 seconds) to run.
>>      11,036,666 microseconds (11.036666 seconds, 84.31%) of which was spent in GC.
>> During that period, and with 24 available CPU cores,
>>      12,734,283 microseconds (12.734283 seconds) were spent in user mode
>>         336,005 microseconds ( 0.336005 seconds) were spent in system mode
>>  1,600,000,032 bytes of memory allocated.
>>  397,400 minor page faults, 0 major page faults, 0 swaps.
>> 5000000050000000
>> ?
>> 
>> On Fri, Jan 5, 2024 at 3:10 PM Taoufik Dachraoui <dachraoui.taoufik at gmail.com <mailto:dachraoui.taoufik at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>> Hi
>>> 
>>> In my current implementation of a classical actor model
>>> I found that using ccl processes is much slower than sbcl threads
>>> 
>>> to create a thread I use ccl:process-run-function, is there another way to 
>>> create native threads that are much faster; I do not need the ccl scheduling,
>>> I want to create threads that are scheduled by the OS, I think that the ccl 
>>> scheduler is the reason why my ccl tests are much slower than the tests run 
>>> with sbcl
>>> 
>>> Regards
>>> --
>>> Taoufik Dachraoui
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Taoufik Dachraoui
>> 
> 
> 
> --
> Taoufik Dachraoui
> 

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