[libdispatch-dev] libpthread_workqueue released

[Mark Heily]

On 06/20/2010 04:16 PM, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
 >
> How are you planning on implementing the system-wide load
> balancing behavior?  A global semaphore of some sort, I would assume, but
> it's really your assumptions I think we're interested in. :)
>

There are a couple of big problems with using a global semaphore. A global 
semaphore would need to be world-writable, which leads to a trivial 
denial-of-service vulnerability. Another problem is that a thread may take 
the semaphore, and then sleep or block while waiting for I/O. This would 
starve other threads that are waiting for the semaphore to be released.

Instead of using IPC, I'm planning to manage the size of the thread pool by 
using a combination of four variables:
	
	a := the total number of pending work items on all queues
	b := the number of worker threads
	c := the 1-minute load average from getloadavg(3)
	d := the number of online CPUs

These four variables will be used to compute two ratios:

	items_per_worker        := a / b
	per_cpu_runqueue_length := c / d

If the workload is high (items_per_worker > 1) and system load is low 
(per_cpu_runqueue_length <= 1) , additional worker threads will be added to 
the pool. Conversely, if the system load is high (per_cpu_runqueue_length > 
1) or there are lots of idle workers (items_per_worker < 0.5), some of the 
worker threads will be removed from the pool.

> Looking further forward, is this something you would like to propose as
> part of the "official libdispatch sources" for making the code base more
> portable?
>

I think it makes sense to import this into the libdispatch source tree 
instead of distributing it as a separate library. Once some of the missing 
pieces are finished, I'll submit a patch to integrate it with libdispatch.

Regards,

  - Mark