On Sat, Feb 4, 2023 at 8:49 AM robert engels <reng...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> I took some time to put this to a test. The Go program here 
> https://go.dev/play/p/378Zn_ZQNaz uses a VERY short holding of the lock - but 
> a large % of runtime holding the lock.
>
> (You can’t run it on the Playground because of the length of time). You can 
> comment/uncomment the lines 28-31 to test the different mutexes,
>
> It simulates a common system scenario (most web services) - lots of readers 
> of the cache, but the cache is updated infrequently.
>
> On my machine the RWMutex is > 50% faster - taking 22 seconds vs 47 seconds 
> using a simple Mutex.
>
> It is easy to understand why - you get no parallelization of the readers when 
> using a simple Mutex.

Thanks for the benchmark.  You're right: if you have hundreds of
goroutines doing nothing but acquiring a read lock, then an RWMutex
can be faster.  They key there is that there are always multiple
goroutines waiting for the lock.

I still stand by my statement for more common use cases.

Ian


> On Jan 30, 2023, at 8:29 PM, Ian Lance Taylor <i...@golang.org> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 4:42 PM Robert Engels <reng...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>
> Yes but only for a single reader - any concurrent reader is going to 
> park/deschedule.
>
>
> If we are talking specifically about Go, then it's more complex than
> that.  In particular, the code will spin briefly trying to acquire the
> mutex, before queuing.
>
> There’s a reason RW locks exist - and I think it is pretty common - but agree 
> to disagree :)
>
>
> Sure: read-write locks are fine and appropriate when the program holds
> the read lock for a reasonably lengthy time.  As I said, my analysis
> only applies when code holds the read lock briefly, as is often the
> case for a cache.
>
> Ian
>
>
> On Jan 30, 2023, at 6:23 PM, Ian Lance Taylor <i...@golang.org> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 1:00 PM Robert Engels <reng...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>
> Pure readers do not need any mutex on the fast path. It is an atomic CAS - 
> which is faster than a mutex as it allows concurrent readers. On the slow 
> path - fairness with a waiting or active writer - it degenerates in 
> performance to a simple mutex.
>
> The issue with a mutex is that you need to acquire it whether reading or 
> writing - this is slow…. (at least compared to an atomic cas)
>
>
> The fast path of a mutex is also an atomic CAS.
>
> Ian
>
> On Jan 30, 2023, at 2:24 PM, Ian Lance Taylor <i...@golang.org> wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 11:26 AM Robert Engels <reng...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>
> I don’t think that is true. A RW lock is always better when the reader 
> activity is far greater than the writer - simply because in a good 
> implementation the read lock can be acquired without blocking/scheduling 
> activity.
>
>
> The best read lock implementation is not going to be better than the
> best plain mutex implementation.  And with current technology any
> implementation is going to require atomic memory operations which
> require coordinating cache lines between CPUs.  If your reader
> activity is so large that you get significant contention on a plain
> mutex (recalling that we are assuming the case where the operations
> under the read lock are quick) then you are also going to get
> significant contention on a read lock.  The effect is that the read
> lock isn't going to be faster anyhow in practice, and your program
> should probably be using a different approach.
>
> Ian
>
> On Jan 30, 2023, at 12:49 PM, Ian Lance Taylor <i...@golang.org> wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 29, 2023 at 6:34 PM Diego Augusto Molina
> <diegoaugustomol...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> From times to times I write a scraper or some other tool that would 
> authenticate to a service and then use the auth result to do stuff 
> concurrently. But when auth expires, I need to synchronize all my goroutines 
> and have a single one do the re-auth process, check the status, etc. and then 
> arrange for all goroutines to go back to work using the new auth result.
>
> To generalize the problem: multiple goroutines read a cached value that 
> expires at some point. When it does, they all should block and some I/O 
> operation has to be performed by a single goroutine to renew the cached 
> value, then unblock all other goroutines and have them use the new value.
>
> I solved this in the past in a number of ways: having a single goroutine that 
> handles the cache by asking it for the value through a channel, using 
> sync.Cond (which btw every time I decide to use I need to carefully re-read 
> its docs and do lots of tests because I never get it right at first). But 
> what I came to do lately is to implement an upgradable lock and have every 
> goroutine do:
>
>
>
> We have historically rejected this kind of adjustable lock.  There is
> some previous discussion at https://go.dev/issue/4026,
> https://go.dev/issue/23513, https://go.dev/issue/38891,
> https://go.dev/issue/44049.
>
> For a cache where checking that the cached value is valid (not stale)
> and fetching the cached value is quick, then in general you will be
> better off using a plain Mutex rather than RWMutex.  RWMutex is more
> complicated and therefore slower.  It's only useful to use an RWMutex
> when the read case is both contested and relatively slow.  If the read
> case is fast then the simpler Mutex will tend to be faster.  And then
> you don't have to worry about upgrading the lock.
>
> Ian
>
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