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Re: GCD killed my performance
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Re: GCD killed my performance


  • Subject: Re: GCD killed my performance
  • From: Roland King <email@hidden>
  • Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2014 08:42:01 +0800

Have you clicked the 'strategy' buttons at the top left of instruments, I for some reason can only do this after I've recorded a trace, not during? They are easily overlooked but show per-core or per-thread traces. They can be very useful finding places where everything blocks waiting for one piece of code to execute, or you ping madly from thread-to-thread, queue-to-queue. There are stack traces available at each event. It's a good tool for understanding how dispatch queues are being used and finding out whether your dispatch_sync really is staying on the same CPU or not.


On 25 Apr, 2014, at 11:08 pm, Jens Alfke <email@hidden> wrote:

>
> On Apr 25, 2014, at 1:11 AM, Jonathan Taylor <email@hidden> wrote:
>
>> Have you looked at the output from System Trace on both systems? I often find that to be informative.
>
> OK, I tried this and it did turn out to be very informative :) even though I don’t know how to interpret any of the numbers. But just the pretty charts alone told the story:
> - With @synchronized there was very little activity in the System Calls or Scheduling tracks.
> - With GCD there was a whole ton of activity.
> I was surprised there’s this much of a difference, because there’s no actual concurrency in the code at this point! In the commit I’ve rolled back to, all I’ve done is taken my existing single-threaded code and wrapped the C calls with either @synchronized or dispatch_sync. My understanding is that while dispatch_sync is technically switching to a different dispatch queue, if there isn’t any contention it will just do some bookkeeping and run the block on the same thread’s stack. So in this case I wouldn’t expect there to be any actual thread switching going on; except there is.
>
> … So then I searched the project for “dispatch_async” and found that there was actually _one_ call to it, so my statement about “no actual concurrency” above was a lie. The block it runs doesn’t really need to be async; I was just running it that way because I didn’t need it to complete right away. I changed that call to dispatch_sync, and voila! Almost all the thread scheduling and system calls went away; the system trace now looks like the @synchronized one, and the benchmark times are now slightly better than @synchronized!
>
> I guess this makes sense: dispatch_sync is super cheap in the uncontended case, but if there’s a dispatch_async pending, then that one obviously has to run first, and it’s probably been scheduled onto another thread, so the dispatch_sync has to either queue onto that thread or at least do some more-expensive locking to wait for the other thread to finish the async call.
>
> I’m ending up at the opposite of the received wisdom, namely:
> * dispatch_sync is a lot cheaper than dispatch_async
> * only use dispatch_async if you really need to, or for an expensive operation, because it will slow down all your dispatch_sync calls
>
> I wish there were a big fat super-dense O’Reilly or Big Nerd Ranch book about GCD so I didn’t have to figure all this out on my own...
>
> —Jens
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  • Follow-Ups:
    • Re: GCD killed my performance
      • From: Jens Alfke <email@hidden>
References: 
 >Re: GCD killed my performance (From: Jonathan Taylor <email@hidden>)
 >Re: GCD killed my performance (From: Jens Alfke <email@hidden>)

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