Backoff not kicking in, 100% usage on all CPUs

[zevv]

Running the following snippet makes my laptop hot, all CPUs spin at 100%

import weave, os

init(Weave)
os.sleep(10 * 1000)
exit(Weave)

Quick profiling indicates that CPU is spent in tryRecv / recvProxy

[zevv]

"Don't do that" is the proper answer, right? :)

Thanks for your talk today, and it was a pleasure meeting you!

[mratsim]

Here is a way to do that:

import weave, os

init(Weave)
syncRoot(Weave)  # Empty the task queue
echo "Going to sleep"
os.sleep(10 * 1000)
echo "Waking up"
exit(Weave)

In your case what happens is:

• You create threads
• The main thread goes to sleep
• Child threads send steal requests
• They get stuck in the main thread which is sleeping
• Child threads can't sleep unless they are notified that there is no work (but no notification since thread is sleeping)
• The main thread wakes up
• Now it can handle the incoming requests

In short, similar to async/io don't block without handing back control to the scheduler otherwise mayhem ensues.

Unfortunately this is not solvable with Weave message-passing design. It would work if thefts were shared memory based, sleeping threads would not prevent active threads from looking in their deques but this tradeoff also prevents many optimizations.

Alternatively I could change the backoff mechanism to have regular "maintenance" wakeups (for example exponential backoff) bu it's less efficient on a single computer (though it's the only way to have backoff in a distributed setting https://github.com/mratsim/weave/blob/v0.3.0/weave/channels/event_notifiers_and_backoff.md#distributed-backoff-and-contention-resolution-strategies