Re: [Boost-users] [iostreams] Devices and WOULD_BLOCK

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] [iostreams] Devices and WOULD_BLOCK
From: Brian Budge (brian.budge_at_[hidden])
Date: 2015-01-27 11:16:50

On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 10:51 PM, Gavin Lambert <gavinl_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> On 27/01/2015 15:08, Niall Douglas wrote:

> As I said, it's not a big difference (atomic ops are typically ~1us, and
> that was on the previous CPU generation), but it's still one of my pet
> peeves, as while there are many places where shared_ptrs do need to get
> copied for correctness, parameter passing is not one of those places. (And
> performance gets worse if you end up passing the object through many layers
> as part of keeping methods short or similar "tidiness" or abstraction
> guidelines; and it wastes more stack too.)

I got distracted by the ~1us estimate you gave here.  I just wrote a
quick benchmark for an uncontended fetch_add + compare and repeat, and
came up with about 22 cycles total per iteration, which is about 7 ns
per iteration.  If I use a volatile int instead of an atomic, it is
just over 2 ns per iteration.   It's more expensive, but it seems to
be less than an order of magnitude, rather than the 3 orders of
magnitude mentioned above.  Here's the code for posterity.

#include <atomic>

int main(int argc, char **args) {
#if 1
  std::atomic<int> count(1000000000);
  while (count.fetch_add(-1, std::memory_order_relaxed));
#else
  volatile int count = 1000000000;
  while (count--);
#endif
  return 0;
}

Sorry to derail the discussion.  Carry on.