Re: Runtime performance degradation for multi-threaded C FFI callback

On 23/01/2012 14:54, John Lato wrote:

I agree the OS scheduler is likely to contribute to our different observations. I'll try to test with ghc-7.4-rc1 tonight to see if I get similar results to 7.2.1.

If you want to see some code I'll post it, although I doubt it's necessary. I would appreciate it if you (or someone else in the know) could answer a question for me: does the GHC runtime handle scheduling of code from Haskell threads (forkIO) and foreign callbacks (via FunPtr's) in the same way, or are there restrictions on which capability may handle one or the other (ignoring bound threads and the like)?

Callbacks always create bound threads. There are no restrictions on which capabilities can handle either forkIO or bound threads. Cheers, Simon

Thank you, John L.

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 1:26 PM, Simon Marlow wrote:

...

I'll need to analyse the program to see what's going on. There was a small change to the scheduler between 7.2.1 and 7.2.2 that could conceivably have made a difference in this scenario, but it was aimed at fixing a bug rather than improvement performance.

Another possibility is a difference in OS scheduling behaviour between yours and Daniel Fischer's setup. In microbenchmarks like this, it's easy for a difference in OS scheduling behaviour to make a large difference in performance if it happens consistently.

Cheers, Simon