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Re: [perl #128227] vfork should be used for spawning externalprocesses

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From:
Eric Wong
Date:
May 24, 2016 22:51
Subject:
Re: [perl #128227] vfork should be used for spawning externalprocesses
Message ID:
20160524225039.GA14215@dcvr.yhbt.net
Zefram via RT <perlbug-followup@perl.org> wrote:
> via RT wrote:
> >In my attached example (vfork.perl) using Inline::C, it only takes
> >around 3 seconds to vfork+execve+waitpid "/bin/true" 10000 times
> >on my system.  With the Perl CORE::system() function, it takes
> >11-12 seconds(!). 
> 
> This is not a fair comparison.  You should compare standard CORE::system()
> against an equivalent implementation of the system op that uses vfork
> instead of fork, because that's the change that you're proposing we
> should make.

Oops, missed the pipe creation and probably a few other things
system() does.

I tried dumbly swapping out fork() for vfork() in the perl
sources but of course that doesn't work, yet: the child process
is modifying its heap in several places and probably doing other
vfork-incompatible things.

I still haven't had time to digest and learn much about the
perl internals; but I figured I'd start with a wishlist
report to get things started.

Anyways, attached is a tiny standalone C program with most
error-checking omitted.  I've only tested it on Debian GNU/Linux
but hopefully it runs on most POSIX-like systems with vfork.

$ gcc -o vfork-test -Wall -O2 vfork-test.c

$ time ./vfork-test : normal fork()

real    0m6.444s
user    0m0.023s
sys     0m1.713s

$ time ./vfork-test vfork

real    0m2.725s
user    0m0.013s
sys     0m0.243s


That's only with 10M malloc-ed, increasing the malloc-ed size
will show vfork performance remains stable as process size
increases.

Anyways, I hope the above numbers are convincing enough to have
somebody more familiar than I to change Perl to use vfork
instead of fork whenever possible.

Thank you.

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