On 4/12/07, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
I've been thinking about some ideas for reducing the amount of refcount adjustment that needs to be done, with a view to making GIL removal easier.
1) Permanent objects
In a typical Python program there are many objects that are created at the beginning and exist for the life of the program -- classes, functions, literals, etc. Refcounting these is a waste of effort, since they're never going to go away.
In reality this is true, but obviously not technically true. You could delete a class if you really wanted to. But obviously it rarely happens. So perhaps there could be a way of marking such
objects as "permanent" or "immortal". Any refcount operation on a permanent object would be a no-op, so no locking would be needed. This would also have the benefit of eliminating any need to write to the object's memory at all when it's only being read.
2) Objects owned by a thread
Python code creates and destroys temporary objects at a high rate -- stack frames, argument tuples, intermediate results, etc. If the code is executed by a thread, those objects are rarely if ever seen outside of that thread. It would be beneficial if refcount operations on such objects could be carried out by the thread that created them without locking.
To achieve this, two extra fields could be added to the object header: an "owning thread id" and a "local reference count". (The existing refcount field will be called the "global reference count" in what follows.)
An object created by a thread has its owning thread id set to that thread. When adjusting an object's refcount, if the current thread is the object's owning thread, the local refcount is updated without locking. If the object has no owning thread, or belongs to a different thread, the object is locked and the global refcount is updated.
The object is considered garbage only when both refcounts drop to zero. Thus, after a decref, both refcounts would need to be checked to see if they are zero. When decrementing the local refcount and it reaches zero, the global refcount can be checked without locking, since a zero will never be written to it until it truly has zero non-local references remaining.
I suspect that these two strategies together would eliminate a very large proportion of refcount-related activities requiring locking, perhaps to the point where those remaining are infrequent enough to make GIL removal practical.
I wonder what the overhead is going to be. If for every INCREF or DECREF you have to check that an object is immortal or whether it is a thread-owned object is going to incur at least an 'if' check, if not more. I wonder what the performance hit is going to be. And for the second idea, adding two more fields to every object might be considered expensive by some in terms of memory. Also, how would this scenario be handled: object foo is created in thread A (does it have a local-thread refcount of 1, a global of 1, or are both 1?), is passed to thread B, and then DECREF'ed in thread B as the object is no longer needed by anyone. If the local-thread refcount is 1 then this would not work as it would fail with the global refcount already at 0. But if objects start with a global refcount of 1 but a local refcount of 0 and it is DECREF'ed locally then wouldn't that fail for the same reason? I guess I am wondering how refcounts would be handled when objects cross between threads. -Brett