Speeding up ruby interpreter in Debian & Ubuntu

It's an ancient trick, but I decided to blog about it while I still remember to blog about it.

Unix (or ELF, to be more precise) shared libraries suck. Well, there are many useful features that are not found on other platforms (like LD_PRELOAD), but the performance is worse than in other systems. And sometimes, dramatically.

The problem is that shared libraries are usually compiled as position independent code (PIC). This is quite slower (especially, on older ISAs, like i386, that don't have have PC-relative addressing) than normal code. Other reason for shared libraries slowness is indirection for almost all function calls. This indirection gives you extra flexibility. ELF shared libraries allow you to replace almost every function, due to this extra indirection. And sometimes this is very convenient, but this is slow.

Now imagine modern C or C++ code, with small functions that frequently call each other. Extra indirection and PIC cost in function prologues becomes quite high. GCC's -fvisibity switch allows you to get rid of some of this flexibility for gains in speed, but few libraries use it, yet.

You can run simple experiment (as I did few years ago). Write a small program that does malloc/free in a tight loop. Link it normally (i.e. with shared libc) and statically. Then compare their speed. I remember as high as 50% gain with statically sinked libc, that doesn't pay performance price for ELF shared libraries flexibility.

There's 'sort-of-hack' that trades memory efficiency for speed. It is possible to link normal (i.e. non-PIC code) as shared library (at least on i386). This way you'll have minimal function call indirection and no variable access indirection at all. You won't pay PIC price too. The only downside of this method is that dynamic linker will have to patch TEXT section pages with relocated addresses, so it won't be possible to share this pages between different processes. The performance gain may well worth it though. NVIDIA folks, for example, build their libGL in this way. And I'm sure they know what they do.

Why I'm mentioning ELF shared libraries? Because Debian (and Ubuntu too) build ruby interpreter as shared library, and according to my measurements, this gives around 10% performance penalty. To regain part of this loss, I simply edit ruby's 'configure' script and remove all mentions of -fPIC. I than 'dpkg-buildpackage' and install resultant .deb-s as usual. This brings performance of ruby interpreter back to it's normal level (i.e. when it's built statically). Another optimization that I use, is passing better GCC optimization flags. "-march=' flag is quite important on i386.

P.S. Read excellent http://people.redhat.com/drepper/dsohowto.pdf by GNU libc guru Ulrich Drepper, if you want to know more details about ELF shared libraries.

Live ruby process backtrace tale

On my current job I'm working with ruby on rails. Around half year ago we had one problem on staging environment. Our application processes suddenly started to eat all CPU they could. Something somewhere got into apparently endless loop. On mature platforms (like Java) you have plenty of tools to diagnose the situation. In this case getting a backtrace would reveal the problematic place. But there was no way to get a ruby backtrace from a running process. Now there is!

My original approach was to use GDB to break into runaway process, grab backtrace via interpreter's make_backtrace() function and print it, then detach. And it helped us greatly half year ago. But make_backtrace is static. So GDB may be unable to see it depending on how your ruby was built.

So for this post I've prepared improved version. This version uses rb_backtrace which is not static and which prints backtrace via printf. It was obviously left for debugging purposes. The problem is that printf uses server's stdout which may be /dev/null. So my newer code

• opens temp file
• dup(3)-es stdout somewhere
• then dup2(3)-s temp file descriptor to stdout
• calls rb_backtrace
• flushes stdout
• restores original stdout back

I'll post a ruby script which does that below. But first I need to note several points:

• it shows backtrace of active thread only (ruby's threads are user-space aka green threads)
• it's fundamentally not 100% reliable. GDB may interrupt interpreter in places where allocating array for backtrace or printing anything will not work. I haven't yet encountered this case in practice, so it should be very rare. Anyway don't expect that after printing backtrace your process will stay alive.
• the ruby script code which feeds commands to GDB is uglier then you might expect. That's because GDB is very picky about receiving new command when it's still processing previous one. I can only guess why.
• this script uses temporary file unsafely. This should be mostly harmless from security standpoint. Point TMPDIR to a safe place if you're afraid.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'tempfile'

module GDB
  def process_gdb_output 
    begin
      line = begin
               self.readpartial(65536)
             rescue EOFError
               return
             end
      exit = (line =~ /^\(gdb\)\s+/)
      if exit
        line = $`
      end
      yield line
    end while !exit
  end
  def eat_gdb_output
    process_gdb_output {|dummy| }
  end
  def command(cmd)
    silent = false
    cmd = cmd.strip
    if cmd[0] == ?@
      silent = true
      cmd = cmd[1..-1]
    end
    self.puts cmd
    process_gdb_output do |line|
      unless silent
        STDOUT.print line
        STDOUT.flush
      end
    end
  end

  def self.print_backtrace_of_pid(pid)
    tmp = Tempfile.new("backtrace")
    path = tmp.path
    tmp.close
    IO.popen("gdb","r+") do |f|
      f.extend GDB
      f.eat_gdb_output

      script = <<HERE
@set pagination off
@attach #{pid}
@set $newfd = open(#{path.inspect}, #{IO::WRONLY|IO::CREAT}, 0600)
@set $newstdout = dup(1)
@call dup2($newfd, 1)
@call close($newfd)
@call rb_backtrace()
@call rb_funcall(rb_funcall(rb_mKernel, rb_intern("const_get"), 1, rb_str_new2("STDOUT")), rb_intern("flush"), 0)
@call dup2($newstdout, 1)
@call close($newstdout)
@quit
HERE
      script.split(%r{\n}).each {|c| f.command c}
    end
    print IO.read(path)
    File.unlink(path)
   end
end

pid = ARGV[0] || raise("need PID")

if pid == "--mongrels"
  puts "Printing backtraces of all mongrels"
  all_pids = Dir[File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__)+"/../log/mongrel*.pid")].map do |path|
    [File.basename(path), IO.read(path).strip]
  end
  all_pids.each do |basename, pid|
    puts "Backtrace of #{basename} (#{pid}):"
    GDB.print_backtrace_of_pid pid
    puts "----------------------"
  end
else
  GDB.print_backtrace_of_pid pid
end