• Austin Clements's avatar
    runtime: directly track GC assist balance · 89c341c5
    Austin Clements authored
    Currently we track the per-G GC assist balance as two monotonically
    increasing values: the bytes allocated by the G this cycle (gcalloc)
    and the scan work performed by the G this cycle (gcscanwork). The
    assist balance is hence assistRatio*gcalloc - gcscanwork.
    
    This works, but has two important downsides:
    
    1) It requires floating-point math to figure out if a G is in debt or
       not. This makes it inappropriate to check for assist debt in the
       hot path of mallocgc, so we only do this when a G allocates a new
       span. As a result, Gs can operate "in the red", leading to
       under-assist and extended GC cycle length.
    
    2) Revising the assist ratio during a GC cycle can lead to an "assist
       burst". If you think of plotting the scan work performed versus
       heaps size, the assist ratio controls the slope of this line.
       However, in the current system, the target line always passes
       through 0 at the heap size that triggered GC, so if the runtime
       increases the assist ratio, there has to be a potentially large
       assist to jump from the current amount of scan work up to the new
       target scan work for the current heap size.
    
    This commit replaces this approach with directly tracking the GC
    assist balance in terms of allocation credit bytes. Allocating N bytes
    simply decreases this by N and assisting raises it by the amount of
    scan work performed divided by the assist ratio (to get back to
    bytes).
    
    This will make it cheap to figure out if a G is in debt, which will
    let us efficiently check if an assist is necessary *before* performing
    an allocation and hence keep Gs "in the black".
    
    This also fixes assist bursts because the assist ratio is now in terms
    of *remaining* work, rather than work from the beginning of the GC
    cycle. Hence, the plot of scan work versus heap size becomes
    continuous: we can revise the slope, but this slope always starts from
    where we are right now, rather than where we were at the beginning of
    the cycle.
    
    Change-Id: Ia821c5f07f8a433e8da7f195b52adfedd58bdf2c
    Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/15408Reviewed-by: 's avatarRick Hudson <rlh@golang.org>
    89c341c5
runtime2.go 22.9 KB