ruby-core

Issue #13618 has been updated by ioquatix (Samuel Williams).


Ruby Fibers as they currently stand are perfect and making them more complex is a mistake IMHO.

Let's be clear on this: auto-fibers are really just Fibers that yield when you call a blocking operation. It's as if you are rewriting the blocking function to call `Fiber.yield`.. and as you have implemented by overriding overwriting `rb_wait_for_single_fd` which invokes  something to resume the fiber when the blocking function is done. This is exactly what async does, but it does it the only way currently possible - by wrapping around _nonblock methods. It's the reverse of what your proposed method does - by handling `rb_wait_for_single_fd`. Because I can't access that method from async without writing C, my choice is limited. But, if it was available, async could use it successfully.

I appreciate what you said about multi-thread multi-fiber execution using your proposed reactor design. I think it's good and it's probably better than libev. It's excellent that you have thought about how to solve these problems and I admire it. However, in my experience, libev is fast enough and n-m concurrency model is fast enough for Ruby. Until Ruby is several orders of magnitude faster, it won't make much difference, except perhaps a tiny bit of latency, but there are benefits to keeping a single request on a single thread or process - you can avoid having to deal with locking and other synchronisation primitives in some cases, e.g. caches. So, there are tangible benefits to using, say, m-process n-fibers vs n-fibers/m-threads model. Ruby has never really suited multi-threaded model unfortunately.

Just to be clear: I'm more interested in semantics than implementation. Get the semantics right and the correct implementation will follow. I see a lot of work done here on an implementation (which is awesome and it looks good), but I'm not completely clear that the semantics are really sound.

In contrast, Async is all about getting the right semantics and finding the implementation that suits.


----------------------------------------
Feature #13618: [PATCH] auto fiber schedule for rb_wait_for_single_fd and rb_waitpid
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/13618#change-65420

* Author: normalperson (Eric Wong)
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: 
* Target version: 
----------------------------------------
```
auto fiber schedule for rb_wait_for_single_fd and rb_waitpid

Implement automatic Fiber yield and resume when running
rb_wait_for_single_fd and rb_waitpid.

The Ruby API changes for Fiber are named after existing Thread
methods.

main Ruby API:

    Fiber#start -> enable auto-scheduling and run Fiber until it
		   automatically yields (due to EAGAIN/EWOULDBLOCK)

The following behave like their Thread counterparts:

    Fiber.start - Fiber.new + Fiber#start (prelude.rb)
    Fiber#join - run internal scheduler until Fiber is terminated
    Fiber#value - ditto
    Fiber#run - like Fiber#start (prelude.rb)

Right now, it takes over rb_wait_for_single_fd() and
rb_waitpid() function if the running Fiber is auto-enabled
(cont.c::rb_fiber_auto_sched_p)

Changes to existing functions are minimal.

New files (all new structs and relations should be documented):

    iom.h - internal API for the rest of RubyVM (incomplete?)
    iom_internal.h - internal header for iom_(select|epoll|kqueue).h
    iom_epoll.h - epoll-specific pieces
    iom_kqueue.h - kqueue-specific pieces
    iom_select.h - select-specific pieces
    iom_pingable_common.h - common code for iom_(epoll|kqueue).h
    iom_common.h - common footer for iom_(select|epoll|kqueue).h

Changes to existing data structures:

    rb_thread_t.afrunq   - list of fibers to auto-resume
    rb_vm_t.iom          - Ruby I/O Manager (rb_iom_t) :)

Besides rb_iom_t, all the new structs are stack-only and relies
extensively on ccan/list for branch-less, O(1) insert/delete.

As usual, understanding the data structures first should help
you understand the code.

Right now, I reuse some static functions in thread.c,
so thread.c includes iom_(select|epoll|kqueue).h

TODO:

    Hijack other blocking functions (IO.select, ...)

I am using "double" for timeout since it is more convenient for
arithmetic like parts of thread.c.   Most platforms have good FP,
I think.  Also, all "blocking" functions (rb_iom_wait*) will
have timeout support.

./configure gains a new --with-iom=(select|epoll|kqueue) switch

libkqueue:

  libkqueue support is incomplete; corner cases are not handled well:

    1) multiple fibers waiting on the same FD
    2) waiting for both read and write events on the same FD

  Bugfixes to libkqueue may be necessary to support all corner cases.
  Supporting these corner cases for native kqueue was challenging,
  even.  See comments on iom_kqueue.h and iom_epoll.h for
  nuances.

Limitations

Test script I used to download a file from my server:
----8<---
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'
require 'digest/sha1'
require 'fiber'

url = 'http://80x24.org/git-i-forgot-to-pack/objects/pack/pack-97b25a76c03b489d4cbbd85b12d0e1ad28717e55.idx'

uri = URI(url)
use_ssl = "https" == uri.scheme
fibs = 10.times.map do
  Fiber.start do
    cur = Fiber.current.object_id
    # XXX getaddrinfo() and connect() are blocking
    # XXX resolv/replace + connect_nonblock
    Net::HTTP.start(uri.host, uri.port, use_ssl: use_ssl) do |http|
      req = Net::HTTP::Get.new(uri)
      http.request(req) do |res|
    dig = Digest::SHA1.new
    res.read_body do |buf|
      dig.update(buf)
      #warn "#{cur} #{buf.bytesize}\n"
    end
    warn "#{cur} #{dig.hexdigest}\n"
      end
    end
    warn "done\n"
    :done
  end
end

warn "joining #{Time.now}\n"
fibs[-1].join(4)
warn "joined #{Time.now}\n"
all = fibs.dup

warn "1 joined, wait for the rest\n"
until fibs.empty?
  fibs.each(&:join)
  fibs.keep_if(&:alive?)
  warn fibs.inspect
end

p all.map(&:value)

Fiber.new do
  puts 'HI'
end.run.join
```


---Files--------------------------------
0001-auto-fiber-schedule-for-rb_wait_for_single_fd-and-rb.patch (82.8 KB)


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