GNU bug report logs - #6600
[PATCH] sort: add --threads option to parallelize internal sort.

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From: Pádraig Brady <P <at> draigBrady.com>
To: Chen Guo <chen.guo.0625 <at> gmail.com>
Cc: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>, Bug Coreutils <bug-coreutils <at> gnu.org>, Glen Lenker <glen.lenker <at> gmail.com>, Mike Nichols <mykphyre <at> gmail.com>, Gene Auyeung <quaker4lyf <at> gmail.com>, Chris Dickens <cdickens <at> ucla.edu>
Subject: bug#6600: [PATCH] sort: add --threads option to parallelize internal sort.
Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2010 10:29:03 +0100

On 10/07/10 05:23, Chen Guo wrote:
> 2010/7/9 Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>:
>> On 07/09/10 18:07, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>>> Chen Guo wrote:
>>>> That happened when more than one instance of memcoll is called on the same
>>>> line at once, since memcoll replaces the eolchar with '\0'. Under our approach,
>>>> the same line shouldn't ever be compared at the same time, so we're fine.
>>
>> Ah, sorry, I wasn't aware of that.
>>
>>> I'm thinking of dropping
>>> the whole xmemcoll0() thing altogether assuming your
>>> statement above is correct, that a particular line will
>>> not be used at the same time by multiple threads.
>>
>> Yes, that makes sense.  We can revert that change from gnulib, since it
>> makes gnulib bigger unnecessarily.
>>
> 
> Actually, the '\0' saves about 5% off runtime last I checked. This is because
> EACH TIME sort compares two lines memcoll would replace the last byte. If we
> set them all to NUL anyway at the start, memcoll_nul wouldn't need to do that
> replacement for each compare. When we output, we'd simply put the \n back.
> 
> I could be wrong though, this is going off memory from 4-5 months ago. But 5%
> is about what I remember, when sorting 1M lines on 8 cores.

Well for the whole line comparison where it works it's 2.9% faster
(or 2.3% adding in the NUL checks to xmemcoll0).
Also xmemcoll0() is probably generally useful since it's a readonly function.
So I'll leave it and fix up the keycompare() calls to it
(while documenting that keycompare() needs to work on a particular
line in line one thread.

thanks,
Pádraig.

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