[go] runtime: reduce contention in (*lfstack).pop

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Michael Knyszek (Gerrit)

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Oct 22, 2025, 8:02:34 PM (13 hours ago) Oct 22

to Fannie Zhang, goph...@pubsubhelper.golang.org, golang-...@googlegroups.com, Go LUCI, Michael Pratt, t hepudds, Emmanuel Odeke, Ian Lance Taylor, Gopher Robot, golang-co...@googlegroups.com

Michael Knyszek submitted the change

Change information

Commit message:

runtime: use backoff and ISB instruction to reduce contention in (*lfstack).pop and (*spanSet).pop on arm64

When profiling CPU usage LiveKit on AArch64/x86 (AWS), the graphs show
CPU spikes that was repeating in a semi-periodic manner and spikes occur
when the GC(garbage collector) is active.

Our analysis found that the getempty function accounted for 10.54% of the
overhead, which was mainly caused by the work.empty.pop() function. And
listing pop shows that the majority of the time, with a 10.29% overhead,
is spent on atomic.Cas64((*uint64)(head), old, next).

This patch adds a backoff approach to reduce the high overhead of the
atomic operation primarily occurs when contention over a specific memory
address increases, typically with the rise in the number of threads.

Note that on paltforms other than arm64, the initial value of backoff is zero.

This patch rewrites the implementation of procyield() on arm64, which is an
Armv8.0-A compatible delay function using the counter-timer.

The garbage collector benchmark:

                           │    master       │               opt                        │
                           │   sec/op        │        sec/op     vs base                │
Garbage/benchmem-MB=64-160   3.782m ± 4%        2.264m ± 2%      -40.12% (p=0.000 n=10)
                           │ user+sys-sec/op │ user+sys-sec/op   vs base                │
Garbage/benchmem-MB=64-160   433.5m ± 4%        255.4m ± 2%      -41.08% (p=0.000 n=10)

Reference for backoff mechianism:
https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/architectures-and-processors-blog/posts/multi-threaded-applications-arm