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Stabilize performance measurement #43227
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@dotnet/jit-contrib , @danmosemsft |
To state the obvious (I think) -- I believe we have good data to suggest that alignment is the dominant reason for bimodality. I'm not sure though that we can be sure there aren't other common causes for bimodality -- my assumption is that we'll find out how much is left when you've completed some of this work. |
Yes, there will definitely be more reason for bimodality, but alignment will fix most of the obvious ones that we know of and then, it will be easier for us to focus one remaining ones. Currently, there are just too many bimodal benchmarks. |
Bolded WIP texts in the plan. |
Never mind, I forgot about dotnet/performance#1587 etc. we're attacking both sides. 😊 |
Another round of analysis. StabilityI went through the stability data for windows x64 and linux x64 that @DrewScoggins shared with me. In this report, "regression" means that loop alignment introduced more variance to the measurements and thus made the benchmark instable, while "improvements" meant that the loop alignment work actually stabilized the benchmark and reduced the variance. I analyzed around 150 benchmarks to see if the regressions were real by checking at the historical data of Windows x64 and Linux x64 for each of the 150 benchmark. If I see that the benchmark had lot of variance historically, I concluded that the loop alignment didn't added to the variance. There were few exceptions like PerformanceHere are some of the take away points:
FannkuchRedux_9The regression happens because of extra padding we added to align some of the loops inside benchmark code. Asmdiffs: https://www.diffchecker.com/ryZqqO6I. MulMatrixThe regression happens because of addition of 5 "NOP overestimate compensation" in hot blocks. The overestimation happened for jump instructions. The way to address is by combining branch tightening with loop alignment adjustments (already planned work). Asmdiffs: https://www.diffchecker.com/IcktyNPi TryGetUInt16:In this method, With loop alignment, we ended up adding padding at the end of hot block that VTune pointed above (Block 2). GetTypeCodeAlthough this shows regression, I verified that there is no loop inside the benchmark, nor a loop in the libraries method that it test. Further, I also compared the asm diffs and there is no "align" instruction. ContainsTrue/ContainsFalseThis one is interesting. The hot method for all these benchmarks is GenericEqualityComparer`1[__Canon][System.__Canon]:IndexOf. In this method, we clone a loop, but later decide to not align it because it had call. However, we do not record that fact in the cloned loop because of which we have to align the cloned loop containing call. Additionally, until we emit the padding in the cloned loop, we have to also compensate the over-estimated instructions. One of the place where such overestimated instruction is compensated happen to be the actual hot loop that the method executes. You can see my detail analysis in #43713 (comment). |
Sometimes, if a loop has checks like array's bound check, we will clone a loop. One variant of the loop will have no bound checks (and hence will be fast loop) while other variant will have bound checks (and will be a slow loop). Depending on the input, we decide whether to execute fast loop or the cloned (slow) loop. You can see an example here. Here, fast loop is |
Moved future since .NET 6 scope items are complete now. |
I read your article here about loop alignment here https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/loop-alignment-in-net-6/ and it mentions that a loop like this
isn't a candidate for inlining because contains a call to a method |
Inlining decision happens in early phase of compilation and when we decide whether to align a loop or not, we already know that it was inlined or not. We won't align the loop if we know for sure that the method will not be inlined. |
The code quality and performance of RyuJIT is tracked internally by running MicroBenchmarks in our performance lab. We regularly triage the performance issues opened by the .NET performance team. After going through these issues for past several months, we have identified some key points.
Stability
Many times, the set of commits that are flagged as introducing regression in a benchmark, do not touch the code that is tested in the benchmark. In fact, the assembly code generated for the .NET code that is being tested is often identical and yet the measurements show differences. Some of our investigation reveals that the fluctuation in the benchmark measurements happen because of the misalignment of generated JIT code in process memory. Below is an example of LoopReturn benchmark that shows such behavior.
It is very time consuming for .NET developers to do the analysis of benchmarks that regressed because of things that are out of control of .NET runtime. In the past, we have closed several issues like #13770, #39721 and #39722 because they were regressions because of code alignment. A great example that we found out while investigating those issues was the change introduced in #38586 eliminated a
test
instruction and should have showed improvement in the benchmarks, but introduced regression because the code (loop code inside method) now gets misaligned and the method runs slower.Alignment issues was brought up few times in #9912 and #8108 and this issue tracks the progress towards the goal of stabilizing and possibly improving the performance of .NET apps that are heavily affected because of code alignment.
Performance lab infrastructure
Once we address the code alignment issue, the next big thing will be to identify and make required infrastructure changes in our performance lab to make sure that it can easily flag such issues without needing much interaction from .NET developers. For example, dotnet/BenchmarkDotNet#1513 proposes to make memory alignment in the benchmark run random to catch these issues early and once we address the underlying problem in .NET, we should never see bimodal behavior of those benchmarks. After that, if the performance lab does find a regression in the benchmark, we need to have robust tooling support to get possible metrics from performance runs so that a developer doing the investigation can easily identify the cause of regression. For example, identifying the time spent in various phases of .NET runtime like Jitting, Jit interface, Tier0/Tier1 JIT code, hot methods, instructions retired during benchmark execution and so forth.
Reliable benchmarks collection
Lastly, for developers working on JIT, we want to identify set of benchmarks that are stable enough and can be trusted to give us reliable measurement whenever there is a need to verify the performance for changes done to the JIT codebase. This will help us conduct performance testing ahead of time and identify potential regressions rather than waiting it to happen in performance lab.
Here are set of work items that we have identified to achieve all the above:
Code alignment work
Future work
jmp
orret
instruction that comes beforealign
instruction.NOP
instructions. Today, we just output repeated single byte90
, but could do better like we do for x64.Performance tooling work
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