[Stackless] question on preemtive scheduling semantics

Kristján Valur Jónsson kristjan at ccpgames.com
Wed Mar 25 10:31:47 CET 2009


There are probably two reasons for this.
a) The GIL is released for the duration of any time-consuming system call.  This allows time for another thread to step in.
b) Aquiring the lock, at least on windows, will cause the thread to do a few hundred trylock spins.  In fact, this should be removed on windows since it is not appropriate for a resource normally occupied...

The effect of b is probably small.  But a) is real and it would suggest that a large portion of the time is spent outside of python, performing system calls, such as send() and recv(), hardly surprising.

K

-----Original Message-----
From: stackless-bounces at stackless.com [mailto:stackless-bounces at stackless.com] On Behalf Of Mads Darø Kristensen
Sent: 25. mars 2009 08:29
To: stackless list
Subject: Re: [Stackless] question on preemtive scheduling semantics

Replying to myself here...

I have now tested it more thoroughly, and I get some surprising results 
(surprising to me at least). When running a single-threaded stackless 
scheduler I get the expected 100% CPU load when i try to stress it, but 
running two threads on my dual core machine yielded a CPU load of 
approximately 130%? What gives?

Seeing as the global interpreter lock should get in the way of utilizing 
more than one core shouldn't I be seeing that using two threads (and two 
schedulers) would yield the same 100% CPU load as using a single thread did?

I'm not here to start another "global interpreter lock" discussion, so 
if there are obvious answers to be found in the mailing list archives 
just tell me to RTFM :)

Best regards
Mads

Mads Darø Kristensen wrote:
> Hi Jeff.
>
> Jeff Senn wrote:
>> Hm. Do you mean "thread" or "process"? Because of the GIL you cannot use
>> threads to overlap python
>> execution within one interpreter (this has been discussed at great
>> length here many times...) --
>> depending on how you are measuring, perhaps you would aspire to get
>> 200%, 400% ...etc for multicore....
>
> I mean thread, not process. And what I meant with 100% utilization was
> 200% for the 2-core Mac I tested on... At least that was what I thought
> I saw - I'll have to test that again some time :-)
>
> Best regards
> Mads
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Stackless at stackless.com
> http://www.stackless.com/mailman/listinfo/stackless

-- 
Med venlig hilsen / Best regards
Mads D. Kristensen

Blog: http://kedeligdata.blogspot.com/
Work homepage: http://www.daimi.au.dk/~madsk

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