[Caml-list] ANNOUNCE: Ancient module
Richard Jones
module, discussed in this group previously.
http://merjis.com/developers/ancient
Rich.
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'Ancient' module for OCaml
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$Id: README.txt,v 1.1 2006/10/06 15:03:47 rich Exp $
What does this module do?
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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
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Please see file ancient.mli .
Compiling
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cd mmalloc && ./configure
make
Make sure you run this command before running any program which
uses the Ancient module:
ulimit -s unlimited
Example
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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
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(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
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Primary code was written by Richard W.M. Jones <rich at annexia.org>
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
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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
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The latest version can be found on the website:
http://merjis.com/developers/ancient
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(** 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
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