Re: [eclipse-clp-users] Slow OutOfProcessEclipse under Unix/Linux

From: Kish Shen <kisshen_at_...5...>
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 18:48:54 +0100
Kish Shen wrote:
> Hi Martin,
> 
> I am not sure what more I can add. Let me try and expand on what I said 
> previously:
> 
> The OutOfProcessEclipse and the RemoteECLiPSe are both seen (and 
> implemented) as remote peers by ECLiPSe. This means that the 
> coomunication (peer queues) are implemented via sockets. This
> includes the ECLiPSe RPC, which are implemented on top of the peer queues.
> 
> When the remote peers were first implemented some years ago (originally 
> the remote peer was for Tcl, this was expanded to Java later. I did not 
> implement the Java side of the interface), I did some timing 
> measurements of sending data via sockets. This was probably done on 
> Linux. From memory, the result showed:
> 
> 1. There is an overhead (delay) in sending any data via sockets. This 
> was reasonably substantial, although I can't remember the exact amount, 
> but it was probably several tens of milliseconds, say 50ms. I suspect 
> this delay is not strongly related to the speed of your processor.
> The embdeed interface does not have this delay at all.
> 
> 2. Transmission of the data is slower (compared to the embedded 
> interface (which uses in memory buffers). At a minimum, the data needs 
> to be copied from one buffer to another (from the sending to the 
> receiving end).
> 
> For the ECLiPSe RPC, you are using the queue twice: once for sending the 
> goal to ECLiPSe, and then again for sending the results back to the 
> remote peer (Java, in your case).
> 
> Togehter this suggest that the communication for the remote interface 
> would be less efficient than the embedded interface (as stated in the 
> documentation), and that you should try to avoid sending small amounts 
> of data via the queues very frequently, because of the (relatively) high 
> overhead you pay for each communication.  For ECLiPSe RPC, this implies 
> that each RPC needs to run for relatively substantial amount of time to 
> overcome the overhead of using the socket I/O twice.
> 
> The reason for using sockets is of course this gives you much more 
> flexibility -- your remote peer can be on a remote machine. However, 
> there does seem to be a price to pay for the flexibility.
> 
> The amount of computation you seem to perform for each of your ECLiPSe 
> RPC seem very small -- less than 10ms it seems. The remote interface is 
> not really designed to be efficient in such cases. I am rather surprised 
> that you seem to have much less overhead in using the Windows version. I 
> don't quite understand this. Note there is no differences in the 
> implementation of the RPC on Windows and Linux, and the only difference 
> are the system calls to sockets.
> 
> So trying to do more in ECLiPSe is the best way round this. You said 
> that the algorithm runs slower if it is all implemented in ECLiPSe, when 
> compared to Java. How much slower is it? I would expect the difference 
> between implementing in Java rather than ECLiPSe to be much smaller than 
> the difference between ECLiPSe and C.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Kish
> 
> Martin Wegner wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> but not when you have a huge communication...
>> Every game stands for one very small communication between java und
>> OutOfProcessEclipse.
>> And when we play 14000 games in 60 seconds we have 233 communication
>> steps every second per core.
>>
>> With Windows XP no problem, with Unix/Linux a very big problem :(
>>
>> It seems that the RPC under Unix/Linux is slower than in Windows XP...
>>
>> Under Windows XP my CPU runs with 100% (70% eclipse.exe and 30% Java).
>> Under Linux my CPU runs with 45% (35% eclipse.exe and 10% Java).
>>
>> I wrote some emails with Kish but their is no solution until yet :(
>>
>> Greetings!
>>
>> Martin
>>
>>
>>
>> Wit Jakuczun schrieb:
>>> 2008/9/13 Martin Wegner <martinator.de_at_...114...>:
>>>   
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> I'm a student and work on a project that uses eclipse prolog with
>>>> OutOfProcessEclipse and Java.
>>>>
>>>> Now I observe that OutOfProcessEclipse is very very slow under Unix/Linux :(
>>>>
>>>>     
>>> I have used OutOfProcessEclipse on Sparc/Solaris and it worked
>>> quite efficiently. Overhead on transfering data from Java to ECLiPSe
>>> was negligible. Size of data was approximately 50kB.
>>> There was no difference in runnig speed (not counting time needed
>>> to transfer data) between Windows and Solaris.
>>>
>>> Best regards
>>>   
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> 
> 
I ran some tests with sockets, trying to reproduce the tests I did 
previous. I think the results I remember was for socket connections 
between different machines, rather than between processes on the same 
machine.

However, on the Linux machine I ran the test on, it seems that there is 
a performance problem when the data sent via the socket is between 4K 
and 40K in size. I assume this is some buffer issue. I don't see this on 
my XP laptop. Do you think your RPC goals may be in that size range? 
[You probably need some largish data structure in your goal to reach 
that sort of size]

Cheers,

Kish


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Received on Wed Sep 17 2008 - 10:49:21 CEST

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