From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.1.3 (2006-06-01) on yquem.inria.fr X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.0 required=5.0 tests=none autolearn=disabled version=3.1.3 X-Original-To: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Delivered-To: caml-list@yquem.inria.fr Received: from discorde.inria.fr (discorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.38]) by yquem.inria.fr (Postfix) with ESMTP id BD4BCBC50 for ; Fri, 6 Oct 2006 17:14:42 +0200 (CEST) Received: from furbychan.cocan.org (furbychan.cocan.org [80.68.91.176]) by discorde.inria.fr (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id k96FEdD4022481 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA bits=168 verify=NO) for ; Fri, 6 Oct 2006 17:14:42 +0200 Received: from rich by furbychan.cocan.org with local (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 1GVrOv-0007p4-00 for ; Fri, 06 Oct 2006 16:14:13 +0100 Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 16:14:13 +0100 To: caml-list@inria.fr Subject: ANNOUNCE: Ancient module Message-ID: <20061006151413.GA25824@furbychan.cocan.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.9i From: Richard Jones X-Miltered: at discorde with ID 452672DF.001 by Joe's j-chkmail (http://j-chkmail.ensmp.fr)! X-Spam: no; 0.00; ocaml:01 in-memory:01 ocaml:01 swapped:01 swapped:01 ocaml's:01 heap:01 heap:01 gc'd:01 deallocated:01 non-mutable:01 mli:01 ulimit:01 ulimit:01 usr:01 Merjis is pleased to announce general availability of the 'Ancient' module, discussed in this group previously. http://merjis.com/developers/ancient Rich. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 'Ancient' module for OCaml ---------------------------------------------------------------------- $Id: README.txt,v 1.1 2006/10/06 15:03:47 rich Exp $ What does this module do? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This module allows you to use in-memory data structures which are larger than available memory and so are kept in swap. If you try this in normal OCaml code, you'll find that the machine quickly descends into thrashing as the garbage collector repeatedly iterates over swapped memory structures. This module lets you break that limitation. Of course the module doesn't work by magic :-) If your program tries to access these large structures, they still need to be swapped back in, but it is suitable for large, sparsely accessed structures. Secondly, this module allows you to share those structures between processes. In this mode, the structures are backed by a disk file, and any process that has read/write access that disk file can map that file in and see the structures. To understand what this module really does, you need to know a little bit of background about the OCaml garbage collector (GC). OCaml's GC has two heaps, called the minor and major heaps. The minor heap is used for short-term storage of small objects which are usually created and then quickly become unreachable. Any objects which persist longer (or objects which are very big to start with) get moved into the major heap. Objects in the major heap are assumed to be around for some time, and the major heap is GC'd more slowly. This module adds a third heap, called the "ancient heap", which is never checked by the GC. Objects must be moved into ancient manually, using a process called "marking". Once an object is in the ancient heap, memory allocation is handled manually. In particular objects in the ancient heap may need to be manually deallocated. The ancient heap may either exist as ordinary memory, or may be backed by a file, which is how shared structures are possible. Structures which are moved into ancient must be treated as STRICTLY NON-MUTABLE. If an ancient structure is changed in any way then it may cause a crash. There are some limitations which apply to ancient data structures. See the section "Shortcomings & bugs" below. This module is most useful on 64 bit architectures where large address spaces are the norm. We have successfully used it with a 38 GB address space backed by a file and shared between processes. API ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Please see file ancient.mli . Compiling ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cd mmalloc && ./configure make Make sure you run this command before running any program which uses the Ancient module: ulimit -s unlimited Example ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Run: ulimit -s unlimited wordsfile=/usr/share/dict/words baseaddr=0x440000000000 # System specific - see below. ./test_ancient_dict_write.opt $wordsfile dictionary.data $baseaddr ./test_ancient_dict_verify.opt $wordsfile dictionary.data ./test_ancient_dict_read.opt dictionary.data (You can run several instances of test_ancient_dict_read.opt on the same machine to demonstrate sharing). Shortcomings & bugs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (0) Stack overflows are common when marking/sharing large structures because we use a recursive algorithm to visit the structures. If you get random segfaults during marking/sharing, then try this before running your program: ulimit -s unlimited (1) Ad-hoc polymorphic primitives (structural equality, marshalling and hashing) do not work on ancient data structures, meaning that you will need to provide your own comparison and hashing functions. For more details see Xavier Leroy's response here: http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2006/09/977818689f4ceb2178c592453df7a343.en.html (2) Ancient.attach suggests setting a baseaddr parameter for newly created files (it has no effect when attaching existing files). We strongly recommend this because in our tests we found that mmap would locate the memory segment inappropriately -- the basic problem is that because the file starts off with zero length, mmap thinks it can place it anywhere in memory and often does not leave it room to grow upwards without overwriting later memory mappings. Unfortunately this introduces an unwanted architecture dependency in all programs which use the Ancient module with shared files, and it also requires programmers to guess at a good base address which will be valid in the future. There are no other good solutions we have found -- preallocating the file is tricky with the current mmalloc code. (3) The current code requires you to first of all create the large data structures on the regular OCaml heap, then mark them as ancient, effectively copying them out of the OCaml heap, then garbage collect the (hopefully unreferenced) structures on the OCaml heap. In other words, you need to have all the memory available as physical memory. The way to avoid this is to mark structures as ancient incrementally as they are created, or in chunks, whatever works for you. We typically use Ancient to deal with web server logfiles, and in this case loading one file of data into memory and marking it as ancient before moving on to the next file works for us. (4) Why do ancient structures need to be read-only / not mutated? The reason is that you might create a new OCaml heap structure and point the ancient structure at this heap structure. The heap structure has no apparent incoming pointers (the GC will not by its very nature check the ancient structure for pointers), and so the heap structure gets garbage collected. At this point the ancient structure has a dangling pointer, which will usually result in some form of crash. Note that the restriction here is on creating pointers from ancient data to OCaml heap data. In theory it should be possible to modify ancient data to point to other ancient data, but we have not tried this. (5) You can store more than just one compound object per backing file by supplying a key to Ancient.share and Ancient.get. The keys are integers in the range [0..1023]. The upper limit is hard coded into the mmalloc library. This hard coded upper limit is a bug which should be fixed. (6) [Advanced topic] The _mark function in ancient_c.c makes no attempt to arrange the data structures in memory / on disk in a way which optimises them for access. The worst example is when you have an array of large structures, where only a few fields in the structure will be accessed. Typically these will end up on disk as: array of N pointers structure 1 field A field B ... field Z structure 2 field A field B ... field Z structure 3 field A field B ... field Z ... ... ... structure N field A field B ... field Z If you then iterate accessing only fields A, you end up swapping the whole lot back into memory. A better arrangement would have been: array of N pointers structure 1 structure 2 structure 3 ... structure N field A from structure 1 field A from structure 2 field A from structure 3 ... field A from structure N field B from structure 1 field B from structure 2 etc. which avoids loading unused fields at all. In some circumstances we have shown that this could make a huge difference to performance, but we are not sure how to implement this cleanly in the current library. Authors ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Primary code was written by Richard W.M. Jones with help from Markus Mottl, Martin Jambon, and invaluable advice from Xavier Leroy and Damien Doligez. mmalloc was written by Mike Haertel and Fred Fish. License ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The module is licensed under the LGPL + OCaml linking exception. This module includes mmalloc which was originally distributed with gdb (although it has since been removed), and that code was distributed under the plain LGPL. Latest version ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The latest version can be found on the website: http://merjis.com/developers/ancient ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (** Mark objects as 'ancient' so they are taken out of the OCaml heap. * $Id: ancient.mli,v 1.5 2006/10/06 15:03:47 rich Exp $ *) type 'a ancient val mark : 'a -> 'a ancient (** [mark obj] copies [obj] and all objects referenced * by [obj] out of the OCaml heap. It returns the proxy * for [obj]. * * The copy of [obj] accessed through the proxy MUST NOT be mutated. * * If [obj] represents a large object, then it is a good * idea to call {!Gc.compact} after marking to recover the * OCaml heap memory. *) val follow : 'a ancient -> 'a (** Follow proxy link to out of heap object. * * @raise [Invalid_argument "deleted"] if the object has been deleted. *) val delete : 'a ancient -> unit (** [delete obj] deletes ancient object [obj]. * * @raise [Invalid_argument "deleted"] if the object has been deleted. * * Forgetting to delete an ancient object results in a memory leak. *) (** {6 Shared memory mappings} *) type md (** Memory descriptor handle. *) val attach : Unix.file_descr -> nativeint -> md (** [attach fd baseaddr] attaches to a new or existing file * which may contain shared objects. * * Initially [fd] should be a read/writable, zero-length file * (for example you could create this using {!Unix.openfile} and * passing the flags [O_RDWR], [O_TRUNC], [O_CREAT]). * One or more objects can then be shared in this file * using {!Unix.share}. * * For new files, [baseaddr] specifies the virtual address to * map the file. Specifying [Nativeint.zero] ([0n]) here lets [mmap(2)] * choose this, but on some platforms (notably Linux/AMD64) * [mmap] chooses very unwisely, tending to map the memory * just before [libc] with hardly any headroom to grow. If * you encounter this sort of problem (usually a segfault or * illegal instruction inside libc), then look at [/proc/PID/maps] * and choose a more suitable address. * * If the file was created previously, then the [baseaddr] is * ignored. The underlying [mmalloc] library will map the * file in at the same place as before. *) val detach : md -> unit (** [detach md] detaches from an existing file, and closes it. *) val share : md -> int -> 'a -> 'a ancient (** [share md key obj] does the same as {!Ancient.mark} except * that instead of copying the object into local memory, it * writes it into memory which is backed by the attached file. * * Shared mappings created this way may be shared between * other OCaml processes which can access the underlying * file. See {!Ancient.attach}, {!Ancient.detach}. * * More than one object can be stored in a file. They are * indexed using integers in the range [0..1023] (the limit * is hard-coded in [mmalloc/mmprivate.h]). The [key] parameter * controls which object is written/overwritten by [share]. * If you do not wish to use this feature, just pass [0] * as the key. * * Do not call {!Ancient.delete} on a mapping created like this. * Instead, call {!Ancient.detach} and, if necessary, delete the * underlying file. * * Caution when sharing files/objects between processes: * The underlying [mmalloc] library does not do any sort of * locking, so all calls to [share] must ensure that they have * exclusive access to the underlying file while in progress. * (Other processes should not even call {!Ancient.get} while * this is happening, but it seems safe to be just reading an * ancient object from the file). *) val get : md -> int -> 'a ancient (** [get md key] returns the object indexed by [key] in the * attached file. * * The key is in the range [0..1023] (the limit is hard-coded in * [mmalloc/mmprivate.h]). If you do not wish to use this feature, * just pass [0] as the key when sharing / getting. * * You need to annotate the returned object with the correct * type. As with the Marshal module, there is no type checking, * and setting the wrong type will likely cause a segfault * or undefined behaviour. Note that the returned object has * type [sometype ancient], not just [sometype]. * * @raises [Not_found] if no object is associated with the key. *) -- Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd. Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com Internet Marketing and AdWords courses - http://merjis.com/courses - NEW! Merjis blog - http://blog.merjis.com - NEW!