• Austin Clements's avatar
    runtime: free workbufs during sweeping · 051809e3
    Austin Clements authored
    This extends the sweeper to free workbufs back to the heap between GC
    cycles, allowing this memory to be reused for GC'd allocations or
    eventually returned to the OS.
    
    This helps for applications that have high peak heap usage relative to
    their regular heap usage (for example, a high-memory initialization
    phase). Workbuf memory is roughly proportional to heap size and since
    we currently never free workbufs, it's proportional to *peak* heap
    size. By freeing workbufs, we can release and reuse this memory for
    other purposes when the heap shrinks.
    
    This is somewhat complicated because this costs ~1–2 µs per workbuf
    span, so for large heaps it's too expensive to just do synchronously
    after mark termination between starting the world and dropping the
    worldsema. Hence, we do it asynchronously in the sweeper. This adds a
    list of "free" workbuf spans that can be returned to the heap. GC
    moves all workbuf spans to this list after mark termination and the
    background sweeper drains this list back to the heap. If the sweeper
    doesn't finish, that's fine, since getempty can directly reuse any
    remaining spans to allocate more workbufs.
    
    Performance impact is negligible. On the x/benchmarks, this reduces
    GC-bytes-from-system by 6–11%.
    
    Fixes #19325.
    
    Change-Id: Icb92da2196f0c39ee984faf92d52f29fd9ded7a8
    Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/38582
    Run-TryBot: Austin Clements <austin@google.com>
    TryBot-Result: Gobot Gobot <gobot@golang.org>
    Reviewed-by: 's avatarRick Hudson <rlh@golang.org>
    051809e3
mgcwork.go 13.3 KB