Go: Buffered and Unbuffered Channels
By: Vincent Blanchon
Tags: Go, Golang, Internals

Illustration created for “A Journey With Go”, made from the original Go Gopher, created by Renee French.

The channel mechanism in Go is quite powerful, but understanding the inner concepts could even make it more powerful. Indeed, choosing a buffered or unbuffered channel will change the behavior of the application as well as the performances.

Unbuffered Channel

An unbuffered channel is a channel that needs a receiver as soon as a message is emitted to the channel. To declare an unbuffered channel, you just don’t declare a capacity. Here is an example:

The first goroutine is blocked after sending the message foo since no receivers are yet ready. This behavior is well explained in the specification:

If the capacity is zero or absent, the channel is unbuffered and communication succeeds only when both a sender and receiver are ready.

The documentation of effective Go is also very clear about that:

If the channel is unbuffered, the sender blocks until the receiver has received the value

The internal representation of a channel could give more interesting details on this behavior.

Internal representation

The channel struct hchan is available in chan.go from the runtime package. The structure contains the attributes related to the buffer of the channel, but in order to illustrate the unbuffered channel, I will omit those attributes that we will see later. Here is the representation of the unbuffered channel:

hchan structure

The channel keeps pointers to a list of receivers recvq and senders sendq , represented by linked list waitq . sudog contains pointers to next and previous elements along the information related to the goroutine that handles the receiver/sender. With this information, it becomes easy for Go to know when a channel should block a receiver if a sender is missing and vice versa.

Here is the workflow of our previous example:

The channel is created with an empty list of receivers and senders. Our first goroutine sends the value foo to the channel, line 16. The channel acquires a struct sudog from a pool that will represent the sender. This structure will keep reference to the goroutine and the value foo . This sender is now enqueued in the sendq attribute. The goroutine moves into a waiting state with the reason “chan send”. Our second goroutine will read a message from the channel, line 23. The channel will dequeue the sendq list to get the waiting sender that is represented by the struct seen in the step 3. The channel will use memmove function to copy the value sent by the sender, wrapped into the sudog struct, to our variable that reads the channel. Our first goroutine parked in the step 5 can now resume and will release the sudog acquired in step 3.

As we see again in the workflow, the goroutine has to switch to waiting until a receiver is available. However, if needed, this blocking behavior could be avoided thanks to the buffered channels.

Buffered Channel

I will slightly modify the previous example in order to add a buffer:

Let’s now analyze the struct hchan with the fields related to the buffer according to this example:

hchan structure with buffer attributes

The buffer is made of five attributes:

qcount stores the current number of elements in the buffer

stores the current number of elements in the buffer dataqsiz stores the number of maximum elements in the buffer

stores the number of maximum elements in the buffer buf points to a memory segment that contains space for the maximum number of elements in the buffer

points to a memory segment that contains space for the maximum number of elements in the buffer sendx stores the position in the buffer for the next element to be received by the channel

stores the position in the buffer for the next element to be received by the channel recvx stores the position in the buffer for the next element to be returned by the channel

Thanks to sendx and recvx the buffer works like a circular queue:

circular queue in the channel struct

The circular queue allows us to maintain an order in the buffer without needing to keep shifting the elements when one of them is popped out from the buffer.

Once the limit of the buffer is reached, the goroutine that tries to push an element in the buffer will be moved in the sender list and switched to the waiting status as we have seen in the previous section. Then, as soon as the program will read the buffer, the element at the position recvx from the buffer will be returned and the waiting goroutine will resume and its value will be pushed into the buffer. Those priorities allow the channel to keep a First In First Out behavior.

Latencies due to under-sized buffer

The size of the buffer we define during the channel creation could drastically impact the performances. I will use the fan-out pattern that intensively uses the channel in order to see the impact of different buffer sizes. Here are some benchmarks:

In our benchmark, one producer will inject a one million integer element in the channel while ten workers will read and add them to a single result variable named total .

I will run them ten times and analyze the result thanks to benchstat :

name time/op

WithNoBuffer-8 306µs ± 3%

WithBufferSizeOf1-8 248µs ± 1%

WithBufferSizeEqualsToNumberOfWorker-8 183µs ± 4%

WithBufferSizeExceedsNumberOfWorker-8 134µs ± 2%

A well sized buffer could really make your application faster! Let’s analyze the traces of our benchmarks to confirm where the latencies are.

Tracing the latency

Tracing your benchmarks will give you access to a synchronization blocking profile that shows where goroutines block waiting on synchronization primitives are. Goroutines spend 9ms blocked in synchronization waiting for a value from the unbuffered channel while a 50-sized buffer only wait for 1.9ms:

synchronization blocking profile

Thanks to the buffer, the latency is here divided by five:

synchronization blocking profile

We do now have a confirmation of our previous doubts. The size of the buffer can play an important role in our application performances.