Motivation:
Highly retained and released objects have contention on their ref
count. Currently, the ref count is updated using compareAndSet
with care to make sure the count doesn't overflow, double free, or
revive the object.
Profiling has shown that a non trivial (~1%) of CPU time on gRPC
latency benchmarks is from the ref count updating.
Modification:
Rather than pessimistically assuming the ref count will be invalid,
optimistically update it assuming it will be. If the update was
wrong, then use the slow path to revert the change and throw an
execption. Most of the time, the ref counts are correct.
This changes from using compareAndSet to getAndAdd, which emits a
different CPU instruction on x86 (CMPXCHG to XADD). Because the
CPU knows it will modifiy the memory, it can avoid contention.
On a highly contended machine, this can be about 2x faster.
There is a downside to the new approach. The ref counters can
temporarily enter invalid states if over retained or over released.
The code does handle these overflow and underflow scenarios, but it
is possible that another concurrent access may push the failure to
a different location. For example:
Time 1 Thread 1: obj.retain(INT_MAX - 1)
Time 2 Thread 1: obj.retain(2)
Time 2 Thread 2: obj.retain(1)
Previously Thread 2 would always succeed and Thread 1 would always
fail on the second access. Now, thread 2 could fail while thread 1
is rolling back its change.
====
There are a few reasons why I think this is okay:
1. Buggy code is going to have bugs. An exception _is_ going to be
thrown. This just causes the other threads to notice the state
is messed up and stop early.
2. If high retention counts are a use case, then ref count should
be a long rather than an int.
3. The critical section is greatly reduced compared to the previous
version, so the likelihood of this happening is lower
4. On error, the code always rollsback the change atomically, so
there is no possibility of corruption.
Result:
Faster refcounting
```
BEFORE:
Benchmark (delay) Mode Cnt Score Error Units
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_contended 1 sample 2901361 804.579 ± 1.835 ns/op
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_contended 10 sample 3038729 785.376 ± 16.471 ns/op
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_contended 100 sample 2899401 817.392 ± 6.668 ns/op
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_contended 1000 sample 3650566 2077.700 ± 0.600 ns/op
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_contended 10000 sample 3005467 19949.334 ± 4.243 ns/op
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_uncontended 1 sample 456091 48.610 ± 1.162 ns/op
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_uncontended 10 sample 732051 62.599 ± 0.815 ns/op
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_uncontended 100 sample 778925 228.629 ± 1.205 ns/op
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_uncontended 1000 sample 633682 2002.987 ± 2.856 ns/op
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_uncontended 10000 sample 506442 19735.345 ± 12.312 ns/op
AFTER:
Benchmark (delay) Mode Cnt Score Error Units
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_contended 1 sample 3761980 383.436 ± 1.315 ns/op
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_contended 10 sample 3667304 474.429 ± 1.101 ns/op
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_contended 100 sample 3039374 479.267 ± 0.435 ns/op
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_contended 1000 sample 3709210 2044.603 ± 0.989 ns/op
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_contended 10000 sample 3011591 19904.227 ± 18.025 ns/op
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_uncontended 1 sample 494975 52.269 ± 8.345 ns/op
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_uncontended 10 sample 771094 62.290 ± 0.795 ns/op
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_uncontended 100 sample 763230 235.044 ± 1.552 ns/op
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_uncontended 1000 sample 634037 2006.578 ± 3.574 ns/op
AbstractReferenceCountedByteBufBenchmark.retainRelease_uncontended 10000 sample 506284 19742.605 ± 13.729 ns/op
```
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