Cutelyst 1.6.0 released, to infinity and beyond!

Once 1.5.0 was release I thought the next release would be a small one, it started with a bunch of bug fixes, Simon Wilper made a contribution to Utils::Sql, basically when things get out to production you find bugs, so there were tons of fixes to WSGI module.

Then TechEmpower benchmarks first preview for round 14 came out, Cutelyst performance was great, so I was planning to release 1.6.0 as it was but second preview fixed a bug that Cutelyst results were scaled up, so our performance was worse than on round 13, and that didn’t make sense since now it had jemalloc and a few other improvements.

Actually the results on the 40+HT core server were close to the one I did locally with a single thread.

Looking at the machine state it was clear that only a few (9) workers were running at the same time, I then decided to create an experimental connection balancer for threads. Basically the main thread accepts incoming connections and evenly pass them to each thread, this of course puts a new bottleneck on the main thread. Once the code was ready which end up improving other parts of WSGI I became aware of SO_REUSEPORT.

The socket option reuse port is available on Linux >3.9, and different from BSD it implements a simple load balancer. This obsoleted my thread balancer but it still useful on !Linux. This option is also nicer since it works for process as well.

With 80 cores there’s still the chance that the OS scheduler put most of your threads on the same cores, and maybe even move them when under load. So an option for setting a CPU affinity was also added, this allows for each work be pinned to one or more cores evenly. It uses the same logic as uwsgi.

Now that WSGI module supported all these features preview 3 of benchmarks came out and the results where still terrible… further investigation revealed that a variable supposed to be set with CPU core count was set to 8 instead of 80. I’m sure all this work did improve performance for servers with a lots of cores so in the end the wrong interpretation was good after all 🙂

Preview 4 came out and we are back to the top, I’ll do another post once it’s final.

Code name “to infinity and beyond” came to head due scalability options it got 😀

Last but not least I did my best to get rid of doxygen missing documentation warnings.

Have fun https://github.com/cutelyst/cutelyst/archive/v1.6.0.tar.gz