OPTIM: vars: use a cebtree instead of a list for variable names
Configs involving many variables can start to eat a lot of CPU in name
lookups. The reason is that the names themselves are dynamic in that
they are relative to dynamic objects (sessions, streams, etc), so
there's no fixed index for example. The current implementation relies
on a standard linked list, and in order to speed up lookups and avoid
comparing strings, only a 64-bit hash of the variable's name is stored
and compared everywhere.
But with just 100 variables and 1000 accesses in a config, it's clearly
visible that variable name lookup can reach 56% CPU with a config
generated this way:
for i in {0..100}; do
printf "\thttp-request set-var(txn.var%04d) int(%d)" $i $i;
for j in {1..10}; do [ $i -lt $j ] || printf ",add(txn.var%04d)" $((i-j)); done;
echo;
done
The performance and a 4-core skylake 4.4 GHz reaches 85k RPS with a perf
profile showing:
Samples: 170K of event 'cycles', Event count (approx.):
142378815419
Overhead Shared Object Symbol
56.39% haproxy [.] var_to_smp
6.65% haproxy [.] var_set.part.0
5.76% haproxy [.] sample_process_cnv
3.23% haproxy [.] sample_conv_var2smp
2.88% haproxy [.] sample_conv_arith_add
2.33% haproxy [.] __pool_alloc
2.19% haproxy [.] action_store
2.13% haproxy [.] vars_get_by_desc
1.87% haproxy [.] smp_dup
[above, var_to_smp() calls var_get() under the read lock].
By switching to a binary tree, the cost is significantly lower, the
performance reaches 117k RPS (+37%) with this profile:
Samples: 170K of event 'cycles', Event count (approx.):
142323631229
Overhead Shared Object Symbol
40.22% haproxy [.] cebu64_lookup
7.12% haproxy [.] sample_process_cnv
6.15% haproxy [.] var_to_smp
4.75% haproxy [.] cebu64_insert
3.79% haproxy [.] sample_conv_var2smp
3.40% haproxy [.] cebu64_delete
3.10% haproxy [.] sample_conv_arith_add
2.36% haproxy [.] action_store
2.32% haproxy [.] __pool_alloc
2.08% haproxy [.] vars_get_by_desc
1.96% haproxy [.] smp_dup
1.75% haproxy [.] var_set.part.0
1.74% haproxy [.] cebu64_first
1.07% [kernel] [k] aq_hw_read_reg
1.03% haproxy [.] pool_put_to_cache
1.00% haproxy [.] sample_process
The performance lowers a bit earlier than with the list however. What
can be seen is that the performance maintains a plateau till 25 vars,
starts degrading a little bit for the tree while it remains stable till
28 vars for the list. Then both cross at 42 vars and the list continues
to degrade doing a hyperbole while the tree resists better. The biggest
loss is at around 32 variables where the list stays 10% higher.
Regardless, given the extremely narrow band where the list is better, it
looks relevant to switch to this in order to preserve the almost linear
performance of large setups. For example at 1000 variables and 10k
lookups, the tree is 18 times faster than the list.
In addition this reduces the size of the struct vars by 8 bytes since
there's a single pointer, though it could make sense to re-invest them
into a secondary head for example.