Extremely slooooow __sys_ftruncate?
Steve Kargl
sgk at troutmask.apl.washington.edu
Fri Mar 21 06:33:56 PDT 2008
On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 07:00:37PM -1000, Jeff Roberson wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Mar 2008, Steve Kargl wrote:
>
> >On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 08:02:54PM -0700, Steve Kargl wrote:
> >>In the process of helping to debug a problem with gcc-4.4.0
> >>(actually a gfortran problem), I run gprof on the executable.
> >>The profile shows that __sys_ftruncate is extremely slow.
> >>
> >> % cumulative self self total
> >> time seconds seconds calls ms/call ms/call name
> >> 85.6 6.05 6.05 51830 0.12 0.12 __sys_ftruncate [2]
> >> 5.6 6.44 0.40 0 100.00% .mcount (101)
> >> 1.7 6.56 0.12 51872 0.00 0.00 _lseek [5]
> >> 1.6 6.67 0.11 52055 0.00 0.00 sigprocmask [6]
> >> 0.8 6.73 0.06 103687 0.00 0.00 memset [14]
> >> 0.4 6.76 0.03 488 0.06 0.06 __sys_write [18]
> >> 0.4 6.79 0.03 0 100.00%
> >> formatted_transfer_scalar
> >>
> >>time ./z
> >> 184.21 real 0.98 user 6.57 sys
> >>
> >>This program should finish well under 184 seconds. The same program
> >>and exact same gcc/gfortran source on linux shows
> >> real 0m0.555s user 0m0.103s sys 0m0.452s
> >>
> >>Is __sys_ftruncate known to have performance problems?
> >>
> >
> >Well, I tried to kludge together a C example based on the
> >the Fortran test code and gfortran runtime library.
>
> Thanks for the test code. truncate is only handled by softupdates when
> it's a truncate to 0. Otherwise it's synchronous. :/
Oh. :(
> I would argue that the program is doing something terrible. However, we
> also shouldn't be so slow.
>
> I'm confused by your example however. For each iteration we're writing 4
> bytes and then truncating 3 of them off? Is that right? Is that what the
> compiler is actually doing?
This problem is associated with how gfortran has implemented the Fortran
2003 Stream I/O feature. gfortran uses essentially a double-buffering
scheme within its IO system to accommodate all of the supported operating
systems. Because of this scheme it has been difficult for me to trace
through the code. I tried to write as short as possible example C program
that touches write, lseek, and ftruncate to see the problem in one particular
code path.
Now that I know ftruncate is so slow, I may be able to work around its
use in gfortran's runtime library.
PS: Thanks for all of your recent changes in ULE and cpu affinity.
--
Steve
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