1. 22 Jan, 2020 6 commits
    • Eric Myhre's avatar
      Smashed out n=25 tests to match n=3. · 53fa8ac7
      Eric Myhre authored
      (There might be a cleverer way to do this, but it's beyond me at this
      present moment, so smashing it is.  And I'll give up my
      "no abstractions in benchmarks mantra" for this one enough to put a
      value table together and pay the cost to offset into it.)
      
      Confirmed, things do get better at larger scale.
      
      ```
      pkg: github.com/ipld/go-ipld-prime/_rsrch/nodesolution/impls
      BenchmarkMap3nBaselineNativeMapAssignSimpleKeys-8                6062440               199 ns/op             256 B/op          2 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap3nBaselineJsonUnmarshalMapSimpleKeys-8                520588              2308 ns/op             672 B/op         18 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap3nFeedGenericMapSimpleKeys-8                         2062002               626 ns/op             520 B/op          8 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap3nFeedGennedMapSimpleKeys-8                          2456760               489 ns/op             416 B/op          5 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap3nFeedGennedMapSimpleKeysDirectly-8                  2482074               468 ns/op             416 B/op          5 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap3nBaselineNativeMapIterationSimpleKeys-8            15704199                76.0 ns/op             0 B/op          0 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap3nGenericMapIterationSimpleKeys-8                   19439997                63.0 ns/op            16 B/op          1 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap3nGennedMapIterationSimpleKeys-8                    20279289                59.0 ns/op            16 B/op          1 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap25nBaselineNativeMapAssignSimpleKeys-8                726440              1457 ns/op            1068 B/op          2 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap25nFeedGenericMapSimpleKeys-8                         304988              3961 ns/op            2532 B/op         30 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap25nFeedGennedMapSimpleKeys-8                          388693              3003 ns/op            1788 B/op          5 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap25nFeedGennedMapSimpleKeysDirectly-8                  429612              2757 ns/op            1788 B/op          5 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap25nBaselineNativeMapIterationSimpleKeys-8            3132525               417 ns/op               0 B/op          0 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap25nGenericMapIterationSimpleKeys-8                   4186132               286 ns/op              16 B/op          1 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap25nGennedMapIterationSimpleKeys-8                    4406563               271 ns/op              16 B/op          1 allocs/op
      
      pkg: github.com/ipld/go-ipld-prime/impl/free
      BenchmarkMap3nFeedGenericMapSimpleKeys-8                 1177724              1026 ns/op            1216 B/op         13 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap3nGenericMapIterationSimpleKeys-8            3497580               344 ns/op             464 B/op          4 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap25nFeedGenericMapSimpleKeys-8                 156534              8159 ns/op            7608 B/op         62 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap25nGenericMapIterationSimpleKeys-8            393928              2543 ns/op            3632 B/op         26 allocs/op
      ```
      
      Basically:
      
      - the build time ratio of our maps to native maps actually gets better
        (I didn't expect this) (though native maps still win handily; which,
        still, is no surprise, since ours Do More and have to pay at least
        Some abstraction cost for all the interface stuff).
      
      - the iterate time ratio of our maps to native maps *also* gets better;
        it's almost a full third faster.
      
      - we can confirm that the allocations are completely amortized for our
        codegen'd maps (the count doesn't rise with scale *at all*).  Nice.
      
      - our maps are admittedly still about twice the size in memory as
        a golang native map would be.  But this is no surprise with this
        current internal architecture.  And one could make other ones.
      
      - and we can see the old design just out-of-control *sucking* at scale.
        Building still taking twice as long in the old design; and
        iterating taking -- yep -- 10 times as long.
      
      I'm not sure if these tests will be worth keeping around, because it's
      kinda just showing of some unsurprising stuff, but, eh.  It's nice to
      have the expected results confirmed at a another scale.
      53fa8ac7
    • Eric Myhre's avatar
      Benchmarks for iteration; and for old ipldfree. · c209795f
      Eric Myhre authored
      Results are pleasing.
      
      ```
      pkg: github.com/ipld/go-ipld-prime/_rsrch/nodesolution/impls
      BenchmarkMap3nBaselineNativeMapAssignSimpleKeys-8        5206788               216 ns/op             256 B/op          2 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap3nBaselineJsonUnmarshalMapSimpleKeys-8        491780              2316 ns/op             672 B/op         18 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap3nFeedGenericMapSimpleKeys-8                 2105220               568 ns/op             520 B/op          8 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap3nFeedGennedMapSimpleKeys-8                  2401208               501 ns/op             416 B/op          5 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap3nFeedGennedMapSimpleKeysDirectly-8          2572612               469 ns/op             416 B/op          5 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap3nBaselineNativeMapIterationSimpleKeys-8    15420255                76.1 ns/op             0 B/op          0 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap3nGenericMapIterationSimpleKeys-8           18151563                66.1 ns/op            16 B/op          1 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap3nGennedMapIterationSimpleKeys-8            18951807                62.7 ns/op            16 B/op          1 allocs/op
      
      pkg: github.com/ipld/go-ipld-prime/impl/free
      BenchmarkMap3nFeedGenericMapSimpleKeys-8                 1170026              1025 ns/op            1216 B/op         13 allocs/op
      BenchmarkMap3nGenericMapIterationSimpleKeys-8            3851317               311 ns/op             464 B/op          4 allocs/op
      ```
      
      Iterating our new maps, both codegen and non, is fast.
      
      It's actually faster than iterating native golang maps.
      (This may seem shocking, but it's not totally out of line:
      we paid higher costs up front, after all.  Also, we aren't
      going out of our way to randomize access order.  I am still
      a bit surprised the costs of vtables in our system isn't
      more noticeable, though... and our one alloc, for the iterator!)
      
      We can speed up iteration further by embedding an iterator
      in the map structures.  I'll probably do this in the final version,
      and simply have this be an optimistic system; two extra words of
      memory in the map is nearly free in context; and asking for another
      iterator after the first simply gives you an alloc again.
      It would be moderately irritating to measure this though, so I'm
      passing on it for the present.
      
      The benchmarks for our old `ipldfree.Node` implementations are...
      well, we knew these new systems would be a big improvement, but
      now we can finally see how much.
      
      Much.
      
      Our old system had a whopping 13 allocs to build a three-entry map.
      The new system has it down to 5 (and two of those are internal to
      golang's native maps, so it's trim indeed) for codegen and 8 for the
      new generic one.  The wallclock effect of this was to make the old
      system almost twice as slow!
      
      All of these issues with the old system were forced by the NodeBuilder
      interface and its build-small-then-build-bigger paradigm.  We couldn't
      have gotten these improvements without the switch to the NodeAssembler
      interface and its lay-it-out-then-fill-it-in paradigm.
      
      The new system is also *four times* as fast to iterate -- and does its
      work with only a single allocation: for the iterator itself.
      The old system performed an alloc for every single entry the iterator
      yielded!  This is basically a change from O(n) to O(1) -- huge win.
      (Obviously, the iteration itself is still O(n), but as we can see from
      the timing, O(n) accesses vs O(n) allocs is a world of difference!)
      
      All of these results should also continue to look better and better
      if the same tests are applied to larger data structures.  These small
      samples are pretty much the _worst_ way to demo these improvements!
      So that's something to look forward to.  (Especially, in codegen:
      the improvements we're demonstrating here are particularly useful in
      the long run for enabling us to get the most mileage out of struct
      embedding... which we will plan to do a lot of in generated code.)
      
      Overall, this result pretty much confirms this design direction.
      It's now time to start moving this research back into the main package,
      and propagating upgrades as necessary for the improved interfaces.
      Sweet.
      c209795f
    • Eric Myhre's avatar
      Further condense test and bench content setup. · 2aa18a42
      Eric Myhre authored
      Again, checked for impact: it's in single-digit nanosecond territory.
      Fortunately, "assume the node escapes to heap" is already part of our
      intended model.  And while this function is probably too big to be
      inlined (I didn't check, mind), it's still dwarfed by our actual work
      (to the scale of two orders of mag base 10), so it's fine.
      2aa18a42
    • Eric Myhre's avatar
      Entersen some test and benchmark setup. · ffc140e7
      Eric Myhre authored
      I'm wary as heck at introducing any amount of abstraction in
      benchmarks, because sometimes, it starts to foment lies in the
      most unexpected ways.  However, I did several fairly long runs
      with and without this contraction, and they seem to vary on the
      order of single nanoseconds -- while the noise between test runs
      varies by a few dozen.  So, this appears to be safe to move on.
      ffc140e7
    • Eric Myhre's avatar
      Enable tests using go-wish.ShouldBeSameTypeAs. · 80173ce2
      Eric Myhre authored
      (This is the new feature I just merged all those library version
      bumps to enable.)
      80173ce2
    • Eric Myhre's avatar
      More new map implementation. · 631a8e30
      Eric Myhre authored
      Includes duplicate key checks that were previously missing.
      
      Overall, checks many more invariants.  There are now "*_ValueAssembler"
      types involved in both the 'free'/generic implementation, and the
      codegen implementation: in both cases, it's needed for several tasks,
      mostly revolving around the "Done" method (or anything else that causes
      doneness, e.g. any of the scalar "Assign*" methods):
      
      - to make sure the map assembly doesn't move on until the value
        assembly is finished!  Need to do this to make it possible to
        maintain any other invariant over the whole tree!
      - to do state machine keeping on the map assembler
      - to do any integrity checks that the map itself demands
      - and in some cases, to actually commit the entry itself (although
        in some cases, pointer funtimes at key finish time are enough).
      
      The introduction of these '*_KeyAssembler' and '*_ValueAssembler' types
      is somewhat frustrating, because they add more memory, more vtable
      interactions (sometimes; in codegen, the compiler can inline them out),
      and just plain more SLOC.  Particularly irritatingly, they require a
      pointer back to their parent assembler... even though in practice,
      they're always embedded *in* that same structure, so it's a predictable
      offset from their own pointer.  But I couldn't easily seem to see a
      way around that (shy of using unsafe or other extreme nastiness), so,
      I'm just bitting the bullet and moving on with that.
      
      (I even briefly experimented with using type aliases to be able to
      decorate additional methods contextually onto the same struct memory,
      hoping that I'd be able to choose which type's set of methods I apply.
      (I know this is possible internally -- if one writes assembler, that's
      *what the calls are like*: you grab the function definition from a
      table of functions per type, and then you apply it to some memory!)
      This would make it possible to put all the child assembler functions
      on the same memory as the parent assembler that embeds them, and thus
      save us the cyclic pointers!  But alas, no.  Attempting to do this will
      run aground on "duplicate method" errors quite quickly.  Aliases were
      not meant to do this.)
      
      There's some new tests, in addition to benchmarks.
      
      'plainMap', destined to be part of the next version of the 'ipldfree'
      package, is now complete, and passes tests.
      
      A couple key tests are commented out, because they require a bump in
      version of the go-wish library, and I'm going to sort that in a
      separate commit.  They do pass, though, otherwise.
      
      Some NodeStyle implementations are introduced, and now those are the
      way to get builders for those nodes, and all the tests and benchmarks
      use them.  The placeholder 'NewBuilder*' methods are gone.
      
      There are some open questions about what naming pattern to use for
      exporting symbols for NodeStyles.  Some comments regard this, but it's
      a topic to engage in more earnest later.
      
      Benchmarks have been renamed for slightly more consistency and an eye
      towards additional benchmarks we're likely to add shortly.
      
      Some new documentation file are added!  These are a bit ramshackle,
      because they're written as an issue of note occurs to me, but there are
      enough high-level rules that should be held the same across various
      implementations of Node and NodeAssembler that writing them in a doc
      outside the code began to seem wise.
      631a8e30
  2. 13 Jan, 2020 7 commits
    • Eric Myhre's avatar
      Test whether direct string key insertion matters. · 065416da
      Eric Myhre authored
      It does not.
      
      I turned benchtime up to 15s because in 1s runs, any signal was well
      below the threshhold of noise.  And even with larger sampling:
      
      ```
      BenchmarkFeedGennedMapSimpleKeys-8                      39906697               457 ns/op             400 B/op          5 allocs/op
      BenchmarkFeedGennedMapSimpleKeysDirectly-8              39944427               455 ns/op             400 B/op          5 allocs/op
      ```
      
      It's literally negligible.
      
      It's still possible we'll see more consequential results in the case of
      structs, possibly.  But from this result?  I'd say there's pretty good
      arguments made *against* having the extra method, here.
      065416da
    • Eric Myhre's avatar
      Map insertion fixed. Costly. · ac1b9244
      Eric Myhre authored
      More costly than I expected.
      
      New results:
      
      ```
      BenchmarkBaselineNativeMapAssignSimpleKeys-8             5772964               206 ns/op             256 B/op          2 allocs/op
      BenchmarkBaselineJsonUnmarshalMapSimpleKeys-8             470348              2349 ns/op             672 B/op         18 allocs/op
      BenchmarkFeedGennedMapSimpleKeys-8                       2484633               446 ns/op             400 B/op          5 allocs/op
      ```
      
      Okay, so our wall clock time got worse, but is still flitting around
      2x; not thrilling, but acceptable.
      
      But apparently we got a 5th alloc?  Ugh.
      
      I looked for typos and misunderstandings, but I think what I failed
      to understand is actually the interal workings of golang's maps.
      
      The new alloc is in line 343: `ma.w.m[ma.w.t[l].k] = &ma.w.t[l].v`.
      As scary as that line may look, it's just some pointer shuffles;
      there's no new memory allocations here, just pointers to stuff that
      we've already got on hand.  Disassembly confirms this: there's
      no `runtime.newobject` or other allocations in the disassembly of
      the `flushLastEntry` function.
      Just this salty thing: `CALL runtime.mapassign_faststr(SB)`.
      Which can, indeed, allocate inside.
      
      I guess what's going on here is golang's maps don't allocate
      *buckets* until the first insertion forces them to?
      Today I learned...
      ac1b9244
    • Eric Myhre's avatar
      Better. · 6bd82379
      Eric Myhre authored
      Memory works like I think it does.  That's good.
      
      Added a third entry just to make some numbers odd and effects a wee
      bit more visible.
      
      Fixed the map to do allocs up front using the size hint; and rather
      importantly, actually return the embedded child assemblers.  (Those
      are... kinda an important part of the whole design.)  And that got
      things lined up where I hoped.
      
      Current results:
      
      ```
      BenchmarkBaselineNativeMapAssignSimpleKeys-8             5665226               199 ns/op             256 B/op          2 allocs/op
      BenchmarkBaselineJsonUnmarshalMapSimpleKeys-8             519618              2334 ns/op             672 B/op         18 allocs/op
      BenchmarkFeedGennedMapSimpleKeys-8                       4212643               291 ns/op             192 B/op          4 allocs/op
      ```
      
      This is what I'm gunning for.  Those four allocs are:
      
      - One for the builder;
      - one for the node;
      - and one each for the internal map and entry slice.
      
      This is about as good as we can get.  Everything's amortized.
      And we're getting ordered maps out of the deal, which is more
      featureful than the stdlib map.  And the actual runtime is pretty
      dang good: less than 150% of the native map -- that's actually
      better than I was going to let myself hope for.
      
      We're *not* paying for:
      
      - extra allocs per node in more complex structures;
      - extra allocs per builder in more complex structures;
      - allocs per key nor per value in maps;
      - and I do believe we're set up even to do generic map iteration
        without incurring interface boxing costs.
      
      Nice.
      
      I haven't begun to look for time optimizations at all yet;
      but now that the alloc count is right, I can move on to do that.
      
      There's also one fairly large buggaboo here: the values don't
      actually get, uh, inserted into the map.  That's... let's fix that.
      6bd82379
    • Eric Myhre's avatar
      Here's some stuff that can benchmark! · c51fb607
      Eric Myhre authored
      (Thank goodness.  Been in theoryland for a while.)
      
      There's somewhat more content here than necessary for the benchmark
      that's presently runnable; right now only the Map_K_T implementation
      is targetted.  I want benchmarks of things with complex keys in codegen
      and also benchmarks of the runtime/generic/free impls soon, so
      they can all be compared.
      
      There's also a quick fliff of stdlib map usage in a wee benchmark to
      give us some baselines...
      
      And there's also a quick fliff of stdlib json unmarshalling for the
      same reason.  It's not fair, to be sure: the json thing is doing work
      parsing, and allocating strings (whereas the other two get to use
      compile-time const strings)... but it sure would be embarassing if we
      *failed* to beat that speed, right?  So it's there to keep it in mind.
      
      Some off-the-cuff results:
      
      ```
      BenchmarkBaselineNativeMapAssignSimpleKeys-8             6815284               175 ns/op             256 B/op          2 allocs/op
      BenchmarkBaselineJsonUnmarshalMapSimpleKeys-8             724059              1644 ns/op             608 B/op         14 allocs/op
      BenchmarkFeedGennedMapSimpleKeys-8                       2932563               410 ns/op             176 B/op          8 allocs/op
      ```
      
      This pretty good.  If we're *only* half the speed of the native maps...
      that's actually reallyreally good, considering we're doing more work
      to keep things ordered, to say nothing of all the other interface
      support efforts we have to do.
      
      But 8 allocs?  No.  That was not the goal.  This should be better.
      
      Time to dig...
      c51fb607
    • Eric Myhre's avatar
      make this package compilable. · 98f812d6
      Eric Myhre authored
      per comment in previous commit, it's time to aim towards executable
      benchmarks again.
      98f812d6
    • Eric Myhre's avatar
      More comments on map impl options. Partial decisions. · 85c15e89
      Eric Myhre authored
      We really, truly cannot get away from having a KeyAssembler option.
      That much seems clear.  So that's moved up into the interface we're
      working with, and one of the alternate drafts dropped.
      
      The comments around the NodeBuilder.Reset method are resolved: the
      parts about building keys are removed, as we've concluded pretty
      solidly that those were indeed about to take a wrong turn.
      (Resetting a builder is still a useful thing overall if you're going
      to make a bunch of nodes of a single type: the node allocations
      will still happen, but the builder being resettable should be
      pretty much a giant duff's device action, and saves one of the
      two mega-amortized allocations in a codegen'd world, which is better
      than not.)
      
      Dropped the "demo" function.  This isn't the place for it, and that
      demo had also gone awry.
      
      Some new questions about some of the other "simple" methods on
      MapAssembler and ListAssembler.  Are they useful shortcuts (that
      actually provide a performance benefit if present directly on the
      assembler interface)?  Or are they trivially recreateable from a
      freestanding function operating the interface, and thus better be
      done that way, to save SLOC in codegen outputs?
      
      I think I'm going to start needing benchmarks to come to useful
      conclusions on that last question pair, so... it's time to move forward
      on writing some more implementation code matching these interfaces.
      (Unfortunately, I think there's at least... four different
      implementations needed to get a good eye on things, since the codegen
      path vs runtime fully generic interfaces path have *very* different
      characteristics, and then we need each of the styles of interest
      implemented for each.  But that's just what we'll have to do.)
      85c15e89
    • Eric Myhre's avatar
      let's get the size hint in there before we forget. · 4d3b421f
      Eric Myhre authored
      This is one of those situations where I'd really, really, really love
      to be able to state default values for method params.  And I don't see
      who could possibly be hurt by such a language feature, so I'm sad we
      don't have it.
      4d3b421f
  3. 10 Jan, 2020 1 commit
    • Eric Myhre's avatar
      Start a new synthesis of these drafts. · b03bb1e3
      Eric Myhre authored
      Hopefully to become final.  I'm going to try to copy the contents out
      to the root dir to become the new interfaces at the end of this.
      
      I copied most of the node.go file and it's probably best to read that
      as a diff from the live one.  Mostly, it adds the NodeStyle type
      and the documentation around that.
      
      The nodebuilder.go file still devolved into some commentstorms and
      incomplete parts, but is probably honing in on minimally-unsatisfying
      compromises.
      
      I used a couple symlinks to "copy" the types for Path, etc, from the
      live main package, just to get more things compiling together.
      Those features aren't showing any cracks and aren't up for review due
      to any transitive interactions that are in question, so, this treatment
      is sufficient to move things along.
      
      Links aren't present in the package yet.  I may or may not do some
      reconsiderations on those to match the "style" naming pattern, as the
      'nodestyle' research package already briefly probed; or, it might be
      out of scope and something for later (if at all).  This is a presently
      a compile error until I handle it one way or the other.
      
      The long-story-made-short of the remaining commentstorm is: handling
      map keys generically just absolutely sucks.  There is basically no
      way to do it without massive allocation penalties for boxing.  Any and
      all alternative tradeoffs I can think of are baroque and not pleasing.
      I'm still hoping for another idea to strike, but at this point it's
      looking like it's time to bite some bullet (any bullet) and move on.
      Signed-off-by: default avatarEric Myhre <hash@exultant.us>
      b03bb1e3