mozilla/rust — pull request #12172 by alexcrichton (2014-02-11 00:36:38+00:00)
Title: Speed up green task spawning

These commits pick off some low-hanging fruit which were slowing down spawning green threads. The major speedup comes from fixing a bug in stack caching where we never used any cached stacks!

The program I used to benchmark is at the end. It was compiled with `rustc --opt-level=3 bench.rs --test` and run as `RUST_THREADS=1 ./bench --bench`. I chose to use `RUST_THREADS=1` due to #11730 as the profiles I was getting interfered too much when all the schedulers were in play (and shouldn't be after #11730 is fixed). All of the units below are in ns/iter as reported by `--bench` (lower is better).

| | green | native | raw |
| ------------- | ----- | ------ | ------ |
| osx before | 12699 | 24030 | 19734 |
| linux before | 10223 | 125983 | 122647 |
| osx after | 3847 | 25771 | 20835 |
| linux after | 2631 | 135398 | 122765 |

Note that this is *not* a benchmark of spawning green tasks vs native tasks. I put in the native numbers just to get a ballpark of where green tasks are. This is benchmark is *clearly* benefiting from stack caching. Also, OSX is clearly not 5x faster than linux, I think my VM is just much slower.

All in all, this ended up being a nice 4x speedup for spawning a green task when you're using a cached stack.

```rust
extern mod extra;
extern mod native;
use std::rt::thread::Thread;

#[bench]
fn green(bh: &mut extra::test::BenchHarness) {
let (p, c) = SharedChan::new();
bh.iter(|| {
let c = c.clone();
spawn(proc() {
c.send(());
});
p.recv();
});
}

#[bench]
fn native(bh: &mut extra::test::BenchHarness) {
let (p, c) = SharedChan::new();
bh.iter(|| {
let c = c.clone();
native::task::spawn(proc() {
c.send(());
});
p.recv();
});
}

#[bench]
fn raw(bh: &mut extra::test::BenchHarness) {
bh.iter(|| {
Thread::start(proc() {}).join()
});
}
```