18 Jun 2002 raph   » (Master)

Thanks to Don Maas for an enlightening email about OpenGL display lists. As it turns out, these are not directly editable, but you can do splicing-style edits by composing them hierarchically. Not directly relevant, I think, but interesting.

Asynchrony

David McCusker is going asynchronous on us again!

There are two pieces of the related work that strike me as quite interesting. First, Matt Welsh's SEDA work, which is quite appealing. In his Hotos paper, he makes a strong case that operating systems should not always provide a transparent virtual machine. Indeed, I can think of lots of ways in which global coupling could lead to better overall performance. One example that comes readily to mind is coordination of caches. In multiple processes on the same machine, many megabytes may be allocated in an unused cache, while another highly active cache could benefit from the space.

Reading about the specific webserver application also gave more insight into why the lock contention here was causing such long waits. When the pool of Apache processes is exhausted, the socket doesn't accept new connections. These connections are retried using the usual TCP exponential backoff algorithms. So delays could be in the dozens of seconds, even after the queue is mitigated server-side. All that should be fixed now.

Second, it looks like some serious quantitative design has gone into BEEP. The section where they talk about duplicating some of TCP's flow control caught David's eye, and mine also.

I conclude that TCP sockets are delicately tuned for performance, and that any abstraction which is placed over them carries the risk of destroying this tuning. CORBA is a particularly bad offender. First, it makes it too hard to do asynchrony. Second, it hides extremely useful information about the state of the TCP connection, particularly when it is closed, and when the window is full. If these properties are important, then protocols composed from CORBA will inherently suck compared with those built directly on top of TCP/IP. Remoting other notions of interprocess communication carries the same risks. Yet, in the local case, much simpler notions such as CSP-style rendezvous may be just as effective.

A couple of people pointed me at Twisted, and also libio by Niels Provos. Thanks.

Asynchrony is fascinating, but difficult to master. All real implementations face difficult design tradeoffs. Systematic approaches like CSP are interesting, but I am firmly convinced that there is no universal answer.

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