[zeromq-dev] C++ assertion failed with Java client

[Martin Lucina]

On Fri, 3 Feb 2012 00:39:39 +1100
john skaller <skaller at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> BTW: are you so sure performance will suffer?

Yes.

> The reason I ask is related to existing overheads:
> 
> (a) malloc/free is used extensively in real applications,
> it is already thread-safe so it is using at least some combination
> of locks and TLS

libzmq goes to great lengths to optimise memory allocation where
possible. See e.g. the VSM functionality. There is several *years*
tuning work that has been done on this.

> (b) the use of "errno" by 0MQ is a performance overhead already:
> errno is in TLS which has a nasty overhead. If you want to improve performance
> give up on, or at least provide a sane alternative to, errno.

One extra indirection per load, that has nowhere near the overhead of a
lock. Or does TLS do something more than that? If so, why?

> Fast barriers are provided on multi-cores, implemented directly in the hardware.
> There are also lock free synchronisation primitives on all modern CPUs.
                                           ^^^^^^^^^^

Primitives yes. You still need to implement the full lock
free algorithms, e.g. ypipe_t. Speaking from experience, getting lock
free algorithms right is really hard.

-mato
-- 
Martin Lucina <martin at lucina.net>