Concurrency and the impact on reusable libraries
摘自：http://www.bluebytesoftware.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,f8404ab3-e3e6-4933-a5bc-b69348deedba.aspx
The meat of this article is in section II, where a set of best practices are listed. If you’re not interested in the up-front background and high level direction—or you’ve heard it all before—I suggest skipping ahead right to it.
As has been widely publicized recently, mainstream computer architectures in the future will rely on concurrency as a way to improve performance. This is in contrast to what we’ve grown accustomed to over the past 30+ years (see Olukotun, 05 and Sutter, 05): a constant increase in clock frequency and advances in superscalar execution techniques. In order for software to be successful in this brave new world, we must transition to a fundamentally different way of approaching software development and performance work. Simply reducing the number of cycles an algorithm requires to compute an answer won’t necessarily translate into the fastest possible algorithm that scales well as new processors are adopted. This applies to client & server workloads alike. Dual-core is already widely available—Intel Core Duo is standard on the latest Apples and Dells, among others—with quad-core imminent (in early 2007), and predictions of as many as 32-cores in the 2010-12 timeframe. Each core could eventually carry up to 4 hardware threads to mask memory latencies, equating to 128 threads on that same 32-core processor. This trend will continue into the foreseeable future, with the number of cores doubling every 2 years or so.
If we want apps to get faster as new hardware is purchased, then app developers need to slowly get onto the concurrency bandwagon. Moreover, there is a category of interesting apps and algorithms that only become feasible with the amount of compute power this transition will bring—what would you do with a 100 GHz processor?—ranging from rich immersive experiences complete with vision and speech integration to deeper semantic analysis, understanding, and mining of information. If you’re a library developer and want your libraries to fuel those new-age apps, then you also need to hop onto the concurrency bandwagon. There is a catch-22 here that we must desperately overcome: developers probably can’t build the next generation of concurrent apps until libraries help them, but yet we typically wouldn’t decide to do large-scale proactive architectural and design work for app developers until they were clamoring for it.
Although it may sound rather glamorous & revolutionary at first, this transformation won’t be easy and it certainly won’t happen overnight. Our libraries will slowly and carefully evolve over time to better support this new approach to software development. We’ve done a lot of work laying the foundation over the .NET Framework’s first 3 major releases, but this direction in hardware really does represent a fundamental shift in how software will have to be written.
This document exposes some issues, articulates a general direction for fixing them, and, hopefully, will stimulate a slow evolution of our libraries. App developers will want to take incremental advantage of these new architectures as soon as possible, ramping up over time. The practices in here are based on experience. My hope is that many of them (among others) are eventually integrated into libraries, tools, and standard testing methodologies over time. Nobody in their right mind can keep all these rules in their head.
I. The 20,000 Foot View
There are several major themes library developers must focus on in their design and implementation in order to prepare for multi-core:
A. The level of reliability users demand of apps built on the .NET Framework and CLR is increasing over time. Being brought in-process with SQL Server made the CLR team seriously face this fact in Whidbey. At the same time, with the introduction of more concurrency, subtle timing bugs—like races and deadlocks—will actually occur with an increasing probability. Those rare races that would have required an obscure 5-step sequence of context switches at very specific lines of code on a uni-processor, for example, will start surfacing regularly for apps running on 8-core desktop machines. Library authors have gotten better over time at finding and fixing these types of bugs during long stress hauls before shipping a product, but nobody catches them all. Fixing this will require intense testing focus on these types of bugs, hopefully new tools, and the wide-scale adoption of best practices that statistically reduce the risk, as outlined in this doc.
B. Nobody has seriously worked out the scheduling mechanisms for massively concurrent programs in detail, but it will likely involve some form of user-mode scheduling that keeps logical work separate from physical OS threads. Unfortunately, many libraries assume that the identity of the OS thread remains constant over time in a number of places—something called thread affinity—preventing two important things from happening: (1) multiple pieces of work can’t share the same OS thread, i.e. it has become polluted, and (2) a user-mode scheduler can no longer move work between OS threads as needed. Windows’s GUI APIs are notorious for this, including the Shell APIs, in addition to the reams of COM STA code written and thriving in the wild. Fibers are the “official” mechanism on Windows today for user-mode scheduling, and—although there are several problems today—the CLR and SQL Server teams have experience trying to make serious use of them. Regardless of the solution, thread affinity will remain a problem.
C. Scalability via concurrency will become just as important—if not more important (eventually, for some categories of problems)—than sequential performance. If you assume that most users will try using your library in their now-concurrent programs, you also have to assume they will notice when you take an overly coarse grained lock, block the thread unexpectedly, or pollute the physical thread such that work can’t remain agile. Moreover, a compute-intensive sequential algorithm lurking in a reusable library and exposed by a coarse-grained API will eventually lead to scalability bottlenecks in customer code. Faced with such issues, developers will have no recourse other than to refactor, rewrite, and/or avoid the use of certain APIs. And even worse, they’ll learn all of this through trial & error.
D. It’s not always clear what APIs will lead to synchronization and variable latency blocking. If a customer is trying to build a scalable piece of code, it’s very important to avoid blocking. And of course GUI developers must avoid blocking to maintain good responsiveness (see Duffy, 06c). But if blocking is inevitable, either because of an API design or architectural issue, developers would rather know about it and choose to use an alternative asynchronous version of the API—such as is used by the System.IO.Stream class—or take the extra steps to “hide” this latency by transferring the wait to a spare thread and then joining with it once the wait is done. Libraries need to get much better at informing users about the performance characteristics of APIs, particularly when it comes to blocking. And everybody needs to get better at exposing the power of Windows asynchronous IO through APIs that use file and network IO internally.
These are all fairly dense and complex issues, and are all intertwined in some way. Many of them can be teased apart and mitigated by following a set of best practices. This is not to say they are all easy to follow. These guidelines should evolve as we as a community learn more, so please let me know if you have specific suggestions, or ideas about how we can make this list more useful. I seriously hope these are reinforced with library and tool support over time.
II. The Details
Locking Models
1. Static state must be thread-safe.
Any library code that accesses shared state must be done thread-safely. For most managed code-bases this means that all accesses to objects reachable through a static variable (i.e. that the library itself places there) must be protected by a lock. The lock has to be held over the entire invariant under protection—e.g. for multi-step operations—to ensure other threads don’t witness state inconsistencies in between the updates. Protecting multi-step invariants requires that the granularity of your lock is big enough, but not so big that it leads to scalability problems. Read-modify-write bugs are also a common mishap here; e.g. if you’re updating a lightweight counter held in a static variable, it must be done with an Interlocked.Increment operation, under a lock, or some other synchronization mechanism.
Reads and writes to statics whose data types are not assigned atomically (>32 bits on 32-bit, >64 bits on 64-bit) also need to happen under a lock or with the appropriate Interlocked method. If they are not, threads can observe “torn values”; for example, while one thread writes a 64-bit value, 0xdeadbeefcafebabe to a field—which actually involves two individual 32-bit writes in the object code—another thread may run concurrently and see a garbage value, say, 0xdeadbeef00000000, because the high 32-bit word was written first. Similar problems can happen to GUID fields on all architectures, for instance, because GUIDs are 128 bits wide. Longs on 32-bit machines also fall into this category, as do value types built out of said data types.
This responsibility doesn’t extend to accesses to instance fields or static fields for objects that library users explicitly share themselves. In other words, only if the library makes state accessible through a static variable does it need to protect it with synchronization. In some cases, a library author may choose to make a stronger guarantee—and clearly document it—but it should certainly be the exception rather than the default choice, for instance with libraries specific to the concurrency domain.
2. Instance state doesn’t need to be thread-safe. In most cases it should not be.
Protecting instance state with locks introduces performance overhead that is often ill-justified. The granularity of these locks is typically too small to protect any operation of interesting size in the app. And if the granularity might be wrong you need to expose implementation locking details or it was a waste of time. Claiming an object performs thread-safe reads/writes to instance fields can even give users a false sense of safety because they might not understand the subtleties around locking granularity.
In V1.0 the .NET Framework shipped synchronizable collections with SyncRoots, for example, which in retrospect turned out to be a bad idea: customers were frequently bitten by races they didn’t understand; and, for those who kept a collection private to a single thread or used higher level synchronization rather than the collection’s lock, the performance overhead was substantial and prohibitive. Thankfully we left that part of the V1.0 design out of our new V2.0 generic collections. We still have numerous types that claim “This type is thread-safe” in the MSDN docs, but this is typically limited to simple, immutable value types.
3. Use isolation & immutability where possible to eliminate races.
If you don’t share and mutate data, it doesn’t need lock protection. CLR strings and many value types, for example, are immutable. Isolation can be used to hide intermediate state transitions, although typically also requires that multiple copies are maintained and periodically synchronized with a central version to eliminate staleness. Sometimes this approach can be used to improve scalability particularly for highly shared state. Many CRT malloc/free implementations will use a per-thread pool of memory and occasionally rendezvous with a central process-wide pool to eliminate contention, for example.
4. Document your locking model.
Most library code has a simple locking model: code that manipulates statics is thread-safe and everything else is not (see #1 and #2 above). If your internal locking schemes are more complex, you should document those using asserts (see below), good comments, and by writing detailed dev design docs with information about what locks protect what data to help others understand the synchronization rules. If any of these subtleties are surfaced to users of your class then those must also be explained in product documentation and, preferably, reinforced with some form of tools & analysis support. COM/GUI STAs, for example, are one such esoteric scheme, where the locking model leaks directly into the programming model. As a community, we would be best served if new instances of such specialized models are few and far between; I for one would be interested in hearing of and understanding any such cases.
Using Locks
5. Use the C# ‘lock’ and VB ‘SyncLock’ statements for all synchronized regions.
Following this guidance ensures that locks will be released even in the face of asynchronous thread aborts, leading to fewer deadlocks statistically. The code generated by these statements is such that our finally block will always run and execute the Monitor.Exit if the lock was acquired. This still doesn’t protect code from rude AppDomain unloads—but this is not something most library developers have to worry about, except for reliability-sensitive code that maintains complex process-wide memory invariants, such as code that interops heavily with native code. (See Duffy, 05 for more details.)
If you decide to violate this guidance, it should be for one of two reasons: (1) you need to use a CER to absolutely guarantee the lock is released in rude AppDomain unload cases—perhaps because a lock will be used during AppDomain tear-down and you’d like to avoid deadlocks—or (2) you have some more sophisticated Enter/Exit pattern that is not lexical. For (1) I would recommend talking to somebody at Microsoft so we can understand these scenarios better; if there are enough people who need to do this, we may conceivably consider adding better Framework support in the future. For (2) you should first try to avoid this pattern. If it’s unavoidable, you must use finalizers to ensure that locks are not orphaned if the expected releasing thread is aborted and never reaches the Exit. As with (1), you may or may not need to use a critical finalizer based on your reliability requirements.
6. Avoid making calls to someone else’s code while you hold a lock.
This applies to most virtual, interface, and delegate calls while a lock is held—as well as ordinary statically dispatched calls—into subsystems with which you aren’t familiar. The more you know about the code being run when you hold a lock, the better off you will be. If you follow this approach, you’ll encounter far fewer deadlocks, hard-to-reproduce reentrancy bugs, and surprising dynamic composition problems, all of which can lead to hangs when your API is used on the UI thread, reliability problems, and frustration for your customer. Locks simply don’t compose very well; ignoring this and attempting to compose them in this way is fraught with peril.
7. Avoid blocking while you hold a lock.
Admittedly sometimes violating this advice is unavoidable. Trying to acquire a lock is itself an operation that can block under contention. But blocking on high or variable latency operations such as IO will effectively serialize any other thread trying to acquire that lock “behind” your IO request. If that other thread trying to acquire the lock is on the UI thread, you may have just helped to cause a user-visible hang. The app developer may not understand the cause of this hang if the lock is buried inside of your library, and it may be tricky and error-prone to work around.
Aside from having scalability impacts, blocking while a lock is held can lead to deadlocks and invariants being broken. Any time you block on an STA thread, the CLR uses it as a chance to run the message loop. When run on pre-Windows 2000 we use custom MsgWaitForMultipleObjects pumping code, and post-Windows 2000 we use OLE’s CoWaitForMultipleHandles. While this style of pumping processes only a tiny subset of UI messages, it can dispatch arbitrary COM-to-CLR interop calls. These calls include cross-thread/apartment SendMessages, such as an MTA-to-STA call through a proxy. If this happens while a lock is held, that newly dispatched work also runs under the protection of the lock. If the same object is accessed, this can lead to surprising bugs where invariants are still broken inside the lock. (Note that COM offers ways to exit the SynchronizationContext when blocking in this fashion, but this is outside of the scope of this doc.)
Try to refactor your code so the time you hold a lock is minimal, and any communication across threads, processes, or to/from devices happens at the edges of those lock acquisition/releases. All libraries really should minimize all synchronization to leaf-level code.
8. Assert lock ownership.
Races often result when some leaf-level code assumes a lock has been taken at a higher level on the call-stack, but the caller has forgotten to acquire it. Or maybe the owner of that code recently refactored it and didn’t realize the implicit pre-condition that was accidentally broken. This may go undetected in test suites unless the race actually happens. I personally hope we add a Monitor.IsHeld API in the future which you could wrap in a call to Debug.Assert (or whatever your assert infrastructure happens to be). Sans that, you can build this today by wrapping calls to Monitor.Enter/Exit and maintaining recursion state yourself. It’d be great if somebody developed some type of annotations in the future to make such assertions easier to write and maintain.
Note that the IsHeld functionality should never be used to dynamically influence lock acquisition and release at runtime, e.g. avoiding recursion and taking or releasing based on its value. This indicates poorly factored code. In fact, the only use we would encourage is SomeAssertAPI(Monitor.IsHeld(foo)).
9. Avoid lock recursion in your design. Use a non-recursive lock where possible.
Recursion typically indicates an over-simplification in your synchronization design that often leads to less reliable code. Some designs use lock recursion as a way to avoid splitting functions into those that take locks and those that assume locks are already taken. This can admittedly lead to a reduction in code size and therefore a shorter time-to-write, but results in a more brittle design in the end.
It is always a better idea to factor code into public entry-points that take non-recursive locks, and internal worker functions that assert a lock is held. Recursive lock calls are redundant work that contributes to raw performance overhead. But worse, depending on recursion can make it more difficult to understand the synchronization behavior of your program, in particular at what boundaries invariants are supposed to hold. Usually we’d like to say that the first line after a lock acquisition represents an invariant “safe point” for an object, but as soon as recursion is introduced this statement can no longer be made confidently. This in turn makes it more difficult to ensure correct and reliable behavior when dynamically composed.
As a community, we should transition to non-recursive locks as soon as possible. Most locks that you have in your toolkit today—including Win32 CRITICAL_SECTIONs and the CLR Monitor—screwed this up. Java realized this and now ships non-recursive variants of their locks. Using a non-recursive design requires more discipline, and therefore we expect some scenarios to continue using recursive locks for some time to come. Over time, however, we’d like to wean developers off of lock recursion completely.
10. Don’t build your own lock.
Most locks are built out of simple principles at the core. There’s a state variable, a few interlocked instructions (exposed to managed code through the Interlocked class), with some form of spinning and possibly waiting on an event when contention is detected. Given this, it may look straightforward to build your own. This is deceivingly difficult.
The CLR locks have to coordinate with hosts so that they can perform deadlock detection and sophisticated user-mode scheduling for hosted customer-authored code. Some of our locks (Monitor) make higher reliability guarantees so that we can safely use them during AppDomain teardown. We have tuned our Monitor implementation to use an ideal mixture of spinning & waiting across many OS SKUs, CPU architectures, and cache hierarchy arrangements. We make sure we work correctly with Intel HyperThreading. We mark critical regions of code manipulating the lock data structure itself so that would-be thread aborts will be processed correctly while sensitive shared state manipulation is underway. And last but not least, the C# and VB languages offer the ‘lock’ and ‘SyncLock’ keywords whose code-generation pattern ensures that our Framework and our customer’s code doesn’t orphan locks in the face of asynchronous thread aborts. To get all of this right requires a lot of hard work, time, and testing.
With that said, we may not have every lock you could ever want in the Framework today. Spin locks are a popular request that can help scalability of highly concurrent and leaf-level code. Thankfully, Jeff Richter wrote an article and supplied a suitable spin lock on MSDN some time ago. In Orcas, we are tentatively going to supply a new ReaderWriterLockSlim type that offers much better performance and scalability than our current ReaderWriterLock (watch those CTPs). If there’s still some interesting lock you need but we don’t currently offer, please drop me a line and let me know. If you need it, chances are somebody else does too.
11. Don’t call Monitor.Enter on AppDomain-agile objects (e.g. Types and strings).
Instances of some Type objects are shared across AppDomains. The most notable are Type objects for domain neutral assemblies (like mscorlib) and cross-assembly interned strings. While it may look innocuous, locks taken on these things are visible across all AppDomains in the process. As an example, two AppDomains executing this same code will stop all over each other:
lock (typeof(System.String)) { … }
This can cause severe reliability problems should a lock get orphaned in an add-in or hosted scenario, possibly causing deadlocks from deep within your library that seemingly inexplicably span multiple AppDomains. The resulting code also exhibits false conflicts between code running in multiple domains and therefore can impact scalability in a way that is difficult for customers (and library authors!) to reason about.
12. Don’t use a machine- or process-wide synchronization primitive when AppDomain-wide would suffice.
The Mutex and Semaphore types in the .NET Framework should only ever be used for legacy, interop, cross-AppDomain, and cross-process reasons. They very heavy-weight—several orders of magnitude slower than a CLR Monitor actually—and they also introduce additional reliability and affinity problems: they can be orphaned, process-external DOS attacks can be mounted, and they can introduce synchronization bottlenecks that contribute to scalability blockers. Moreover, they are associated with the OS thread, and therefore impose thread affinity. As already noted, this is a bad thing.
13. A race condition or deadlock in library code is always a bug.
Race conditions and deadlocks can be very difficult to fix. Sometimes it requires refactoring a bunch of code to work around a seemingly corner case & obscure sequence of events. It’s tempting to rearrange things to narrow the window of the race or reduce the likelihood of a deadlock. But please don’t lose sight of the fact that this still represents a correctness problem in the library itself, no matter how narrow the race is made. Sometimes fixing the bug would require breaking changes. Sometimes you simply don’t have enough time to fix the bug in time for product ship. In either case, this is something that should be measured and decided based on the quality bar for the product at the time the bug is found. Remember that as higher degrees of concurrency are used in the hardware, the probability of these bugs resurfacing becomes higher. A murky won’t fix race condition in 2008 that repros only once in a while on high end machines could become a costly servicing fix by 2010 that repros routinely on middle-of-the-line hardware. That jump from 32 to 64 cores is a rather substantial one, at least in terms of change to program timing.
Reliability
14. Every lock acquisition might throw an exception. Be prepared for it.
Most locks lazily allocate an event if a lock acquisition encounters contention, including CLR monitors. This allocation can fail during low resource conditions, causing OOMs originating from the entrance to the lock. (Note that a typical non-blocking spin lock cannot fail with OOM, which allows it to be used in some resource constrained scenarios such as inside a CER.) Similarly, a host like SQL Server can perform deadlock detection and even break those deadlocks by generating exceptions that originate from the Enter statement, manifesting as a System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException.
Often there isn’t much that can be done in response to such an exception. But reliability- and security-sensitive code that must deal with failure robustly should consider this case. We would have liked it to be the case that host deadlocks can be responded to intelligently, but most library code can’t intelligently unwind to a safe point on the stack so that it can back-off and retry the operation. There is simply too much cross-library intermixing on a typical stack. This is why timeout-based Monitor acquisitions with TryEnter are typically a bad idea for deadlock prevention.
15. Lock leveling should be used to avoid deadlocks.
Lock leveling (a.k.a. lock hierarchy) is a scheme in which a relative number is assigned to all locks, and lock acquisition is restricted such that only locks at monotonically decreasing levels than those already held by the current thread can be acquired. Strictly following this discipline guarantees a deadlock free system, and is described in more detail in Duffy, 06b. Without this, libraries are subject to dynamic composition- and reentrancy-induced deadlocks, which causes users trying to write even moderately reliable code a lot of pain and frustration. This pain will only become worse as more of them try to compose our libraries into highly concurrent applications. An alternative to true lock leveling which doesn’t require new BCL types is to stick to non-recursive locks and to ensure that multiple lock acquisitions are done at once, in some well-defined order.
There are two big problems that will surely get in the way of adopting lock leveling today.
First, we don’t have a standard leveled lock type in the .NET Framework today. While the article I referenced contains a sample, the simple fact is that the lion’s share of library developers and customers will not start lock leveling in any serious way without official support. There is also a question of whether programmers can be wildly successful building apps and libraries with lock leveling without good tool and deeper programming model support.
Second, lock leveling is a very onerous discipline. We’ve used it in the CLR code base for the parts of the system that are relatively closed. (I’m fine saying this since I’m basing this off of the Rotor code-base.) Lock leveling doesn’t typically compose well with other libraries because the levels are represented using arbitrary numbering schemes. You might want to extend it to prevent certain cross-assembly calls, interop calls that might acquire Win32 critical sections, or calls into other parts of the system that acquire locks outside of the current hierarchy. These are all features that have to be built on top of the base lock leveling scheme; again, without a standard library for this, it’s unlikely everybody will want to build it all themselves.
Lock leveling is not a silver bullet, but it’s probably the best thing we have for avoiding deadlocks with today’s multithreading primitives.
16. Restore sensitive invariants in the face of an exception before the 1st pass executes up the stack.
This is in part a security concern as well as a reliability one. The CLR exception model is a 2-pass model which we inherit from Windows SEH. The 1st pass runs before finally blocks execute, meaning that the locks held by the thread are held when up-stack filters are run and get a chance to catch the exception. VB and VC++ expose filters in the language, while C# doesn’t. Code inside of filters can see inside possibly broken invariants because the locks are still held.
Thankfully CAS asserts and impersonation cannot leak in this way, but this can still cause some surprising failures. You can stop the 1st pass and ensure your lock is released by wrapping a try/catch around the sensitive operation and re-throwing the exception from your catch:
try {
lock (foo) {
// (Break invariants…)
// Possibly throw an exception…
// (Restore invariants…)
}
} catch {
throw;
}This is only something you should consider if security and reliability requirements dictate it.
17. If class constructors are required to have run for code inside of a lock, consider eagerly running the constructor with a call to RuntimeHelpers.RunClassConstructor.
Reentrancy deadlocks and broken invariants involving cctors are difficult to reason about because behavior is based on program history and timing, often in a nondeterministic way. The problem specific to locks is that running a cctor effectively introduces possibly reentrant points into your code anywhere statics are accessed for a type with a cctor. If running the cctor causes an exception or attempts to access some data structure which the current thread has already locked and placed into an inconsistent state, you may encounter bugs related to these broken invariants. If using a non-recursive lock, this can lead to deadlocks. Calling Runtime.RunClassConstructor hoists potential problems such as this to a well-defined point in your code. It is not perfect, as other locks may be held higher up on the call-stack, but it can statistically reduce the chance of problems in your users’ code.
18. Don’t use Windows Asynchronous Procedure Calls (APCs) in managed code.
We recently considered adding APC-based file IO completion to the BCL file APIs. Several Win32 IO APIs offer this, and some use it for scalable IO that doesn’t need to use an event or an IO Completion thread. After considering it briefly, we realized how bad of an idea adding similar support to managed code would have been. APCs pollute the OS thread to which they are tied, and are a strange form of thread affinity (more on that later). They can fire at arbitrary alertable blocking points in the code, including after a thread pool thread has been returned back to the pool, after the finalizer thread has gone on to Finalize other objects in the process, or even at some random blocking point deep within the EE (perhaps while we aren’t ready for it). If an APC raises an exception, the state of affairs at the time of the crash is likely to be quite confusing. The stack certainly will be. Not only do APCs represent possible security threats, but they can also introduce many of the subtle reliability problems already outlined. They have been avoided almost entirely in three major releases of the .NET Framework, and we ought to continue avoiding them.
19. Don’t change a thread’s priority.
This could fall into the rules below about “Scheduling & Threads,” because it is semantically tied to the notion of an OS thread, were it not for the large reliability risk inherent in it. Priority changes can cause subtle scalability problems due to priority inversion, including preventing the CLR’s finalizer thread (which runs at high priority) from making forward progress. The OS has support for anti-starvation of threads—including a balance set manager which boosts the priority of a thread waiting for a lock for certain OS synchronization primitives—but this actually doesn’t extend to CLR locks. Testing in isolation will tend not to find priority-related bugs. Instead, app developers trying to compose libraries into their programs will discover them. Users may decide to go ahead and change priorities themselves, but then the onus for breaking a best practice is on them, not us.
20. Always test & retest a wait condition inside of a lock.
A common mistake when writing cross-thread synchronization code is to either forget to retest a condition each time a thread wakes up or to test this condition outside of a lock. If you’re using an EventWaitHandle or Monitor.Wait/Pulse/PulseAll, for example, to put one thread to sleep while another produces some state transition of interest, you typically need to double-check that that state is in the expected condition when waking. This is especially true of single-producer/multi-consumer scenarios, where multiple threads frequently race with one another. For example:
void Put(T obj) {
lock (myLock) {
S1; // enqueue it
Monitor.PulseAll(myLock);
}
}T Get() {
lock (myLock) {
while (empty) {
Monitor.Wait(myLock);
}
S2; // dequeue and return the item
}
}Notice that Get loops around testing the ‘empty’ variable to decide when to wait for a new item, and it does so while holding the lock. Whenever this consumer is woken up, it must retest the variable. If it doesn’t, multiple threads may wake up due to a single new item becoming available only for all but one of them to find that the queue actually became empty by the time it reached S2. This is generally easier to do with Monitors because they combine the lock with the condition variable. Missteps with Win32 events are easier because the lock must be separately managed.
Scheduling & Threads
21. Don’t write code that depends on the OS thread ID or HANDLE. Use Thread.Current or Thread.Current.ManagedThreadId instead.
When code depends on the identity of the actual OS thread, the logical task running that code is bound to the thread. This is a major piece of the thread affinity problem mentioned earlier on. If running on a system where threads are migrated between OS threads using some form of user-mode scheduling—such as fibers—this can break if user-mode switches happen at certain points in the code. If this dependency is enforced (using Thread.BeginThreadAffinity and EndThreadAffinity), at least the system remains correct, but this still limits the ability of the scheduler to maintain overall system forward progress.
Unfortunately, many Win32 and Framework APIs may imply thread affinity when used. Several GUI APIs require that they are called from a thread which owns the message queue for the GUI element in question. Historically, some Microsoft components like the Shell, MSHTML.DLL, and Office COM APIs have also abused this practice. The situation on the server is much better, but it still isn’t perfect. Some APIs we design with the client in mind end up being used on the server, often with less than desirable results. My hope is that the whole platform moves away from these problems in the future.
22. Mark regions of code that do depend on the OS thread identity with Thread.BeginThreadAffinity/EndThreadAffinity.
The corollary to the previous rule is that, if you must have code that depends on the OS identity, you must tell the CLR (and potential host) about it. That’s what the Thread.BeginThreadAffinity and EndThreadAffinity methods do, new to V2.0. Marking these regions prevent OS thread migration altogether. This is a crappy practice, but is less crappy than allowing thread migration to happen anyway, causing things to break in unexpected and unpredictable ways.
23. Always access TLS through the .NET Framework mechanisms: ThreadStaticAttribute or Thread.GetData/SetData and related members.
The implementation of these APIs abstract away the dependency on the OS thread allowing you to store state associated with the logical piece of work. Although they sound very thread-specific, these actually store state based on whatever user-mode scheduling mechanism is being used, and therefore you don’t actually take thread affinity when you use them. For example, we can (in theory) store information into Fiber Local Storage (FLS) or manually move data across fibers rather than using the underlying Windows Thread Local Storage (TLS) mechanisms if a host has decided to use fibers. While it’s tempting to say “Who cares?” for this one, particularly since Whidbey decided not to support fiber mode before shipping, I believe it’s premature: we haven’t seen the death of fibers just yet.
24. Always access the security/impersonation tokens or locale information through the Thread object.
As with the previous item, we abstract away the storage of this information on the Thread object, via the Thread.CurrentCulture, Thread.CurrentUICulture, and Thread.CurrentPrincipal properties. We flow this information across logical async points as required, and therefore using them doesn’t imply any sort of hard OS thread affinity.
25. Always access the “last error” after an interop call via Marshal.GetLastWin32Error.
If you mark a P/Invoke signature with [DllImportAttribute(…, SetLastError=true)], then the CLR will store the Win32 last error on the logical CLR thread. This ensures that, even if a fiber switch happens before you can check this value, your last error will be preserved across the physical OS threads. The Win32 APIs kernel32!GetLastError and kernel32!SetLastError, on the other hand, store this information in the TEB. Therefore, if you are P/Invoking to get at the last error information, you are apt to be quite surprised if you are running in an environment that permits thread migration. You can avoid this by always using the safe Marshal.GetLastWin32Error function.
26. Avoid P/Invoking to other Win32 APIs that access data in the Thread Environment Block (TEB).
Security and locale information is something Win32 stores in the TEB that we already expose in the Framework APIs, so it’s rather easy to follow the advice here. Unfortunately, many Win32 APIs access data from the TEB without necessarily saying so, or look for & possible lazily create a window message queue (i.e. in USER32), all of which creates a sort of silent thread affinity. In other words, a disaster waiting to happen. I wish I had a big laundry list of black-listed APIs, but I don’t.
Scalability & Performance
27. Consider using a reader/writer lock for read-only synchronization.
A lot of concurrent code has a high read-to-write ratio. Given this, using exclusive synchronization (like CLR monitors) can hurt scalability in situations with a large numbers of concurrent readers. While starting off with a reader/writer lock could be viewed as a premature optimization, the reality is that many situations warrant using one due to the inherent properties of the problem. If you know you’ll have more concurrent readers than writers, you can probably do some quick back-of-the-napkin math and come to the conclusion that a reader/writer lock is a good first approach. For other cases, refactoring existing code to use one can be a fairly straightforward translation. If you do this, obviously you need to be careful that the read-lock-protected code actually only performs reads to maintain the correctness of your system.
There has been a lot of negative press about the BCL’s ReaderWriterLock. In particular, the performance is at about 8x of that of successful Monitor for acquires. Unfortunately, this has (in the past) prevented many library developers from using reader/writer locks altogether. This is the primary motivation we are tentatively supplying a new lock implementation, ReaderWriterLockSlim, in Orcas. The BCL’s synchronization primitives ought not to get in the way of optimal synchronization for your data structures.
28. Avoid lock free code at all costs for all but the most critical perf reasons.
Compilers and processors reorder reads and writes to get better perf, but in doing so make it harder to code that is sensitive to the read/write orderings between multiple threads. The CLR memory model gives a base level of guarantees that we preserve across all hardware platforms. With that said, any sort of dependence on the CLR memory model is advised against; we did that work in 2.0 to strengthen the memory model to eliminate object-publish-before-initialization and double-checked locking bugs that were found throughout the .NET Framework, not to encourage you to write more lock free code.
The reason? Lock free code is impossible to write, maintain, and debug for most developers, even those who have been doing it for years. This is the type of code whose proliferation will lead to poor reliability across the board for managed libraries, longer stress lock downs on multi-core and MP machines, and is best avoided. Use of volatile reads and writes and Thread.MemoryBarrier should be viewed with great suspicion, as it probably means somebody is trying to be more clever than is required.
With all of that said, there are a couple “blessed” techniques that can be considered when informed by scalability and perf testing (see Morrison, 2005):
(a) The simple double checked locking pattern can be used when you need to prevent multiple instances from being created and you don’t want to use a cctor (because the state may not be needed by all users of your class). This pattern takes the form:
static State s_state;
static object s_stateLock = new object();
static T GetState() {
if (s_state == null) {
lock (s_stateLock) {
if (s_state == null) {
s_state = new State();
}
}
}
return s_state;
}Note that simple variants of this pattern don’t work, such as keeping a separate ‘bool initialized’ variable, due to read reordering (see Duffy, 06).
(b) Optimistic/non-blocking concurrency. In some cases, you can safely use Interlocked operations to avoid a heavyweight lock, such as doing a one-time allocation of data, incrementing counters, or inserting into a list. In other areas, you might use a variable to determine when a ready has become dirty, and retry it, typically done via a version number incremented on each update.
Again, you should only pursue these approaches if you’ve measured or done the thought exercise to determine it will pay off. There are additional tricks you can play if you really need to, but most library code should not go any further than what is listed here.
29. Avoid hand-coded spin waits. If you must use one, do it right.
Sometimes it is tempting to put a busy wait in very tightly synchronized regions of code. For instance, when one part of a two-part update is observed then you may know that the second part will be published imminently; instead of giving up the time-slice, it may look appealing to enter a while loop on an MP machine, continuously re-reading whatever state it is waiting to be updated, and then proceed once it sees it. Unless written properly, however, this technique won’t work well on single-CPU and Intel HyperThreaded systems. It’s often simpler to use locks or events (such as Monitor.Wait/Pulse/PulseAll) for this type of cross-thread communication. These employ some reasonable amount of spinning versus waiting for you.
Spin waits can actually improve scalability for profiled bottlenecks or when your scalability goals make it necessary. Note that this is NOT a complete replacement for a good spin lock. If you decide to use a spin wait, follow these guidelines. The worst type of spin wait is a ‘while (!cond) ;’ statement. A properly written wait must yield the thread in the case of a single-CPU system, or issue a Thread.SpinWait with some reasonably small argument (25 is a good starting point, tune from there) on every loop iteration otherwise. This last point ensures good perf on Intel HyperThreading. E.g.:
{
uint iters = 0;
while (!cond) {
if ((++iters % 50) == 0) {
// Every so often we sleep with a 1ms timeout (see #30 for justification).
Thread.Sleep(1);
} else if (Environment.ProcessorCount == 1) {
// On a single-CPU machine we yield the thread.
Thread.Sleep(0);
} else {
// Issue YIELD instructions to let the other hardware thread move.
Thread.SpinWait(25);
}
}
}The spin count of ‘25’ is fairly arbitrary and should be tuned on the architectures you care about. And you may want to consider backing off or adding some randomization to avoid regular contention patterns. Except for very specialized scenarios, most spin waits will have to fall back to waiting on an event after so many iterations. Remember, spinning is just a waste of CPU time if it happens too frequently or for too long, and can result in an angry customer. A hung app is generally preferable to a machine who’s CPUs are spiked at 100% for minutes at a time.
30. When yielding the current thread’s time slice, use Thread.Sleep(1) (eventually).
Calling Thread.Sleep(0) doesn’t let lower priority threads run. If a user has lowered the priority of their thread and uses it to call your API, this can lead to nasty priority inversion situations. Eventually issuing a Thread.Sleep(1) is the best way to avoid this problem, perhaps starting with a 0-timeout and falling back to the 1ms-timeout after a few tries. Particularly if you come from a Win32 background, it might be tempting to P/Invoke to kernel32!SwitchToThread—it is cheaper than issuing a kernel32!SleepEx (which is what Thread.Sleep does). This is because SleepEx is called in alertable mode, which incurs somewhat expensive checks for APCs. Unfortunately, P/Invoking to SwitchToThread bypasses important thread scheduling hooks that call out to a would-be host. Therefore, you should continue to use Thread.Sleep until if and when the .NET Framework offers an official Yield API.
31. Consider using spin-locks for high traffic leaf-level regions of code.
A spin-lock avoids giving up the time-slice on MP systems, and can lead to more scalable code when used correctly. Context switches in Windows are anything but cheap, ranging from 4,000 to 8,000 cycles on average, and even more on some popular CPU architectures. Giving up the time-slice also means that you’re possibly giving up data in the cache, depending on the data intensiveness of the work that is scheduled as a replacement on the processor. And any time you have cross thread causality, it can cause a rippling effect across many threads, effectively stalling a pipeline of parallel work. As usual, using a spin-lock should always be done in response to a measured problem, not to look clever to your friends.
32. You must understand every instruction executed while a spin lock is held.
Spin locks are powerful but very dangerous. You must ensure the time the lock is held is very small, and that the entire set of instructions run is completely under your control. Virtual method calls and blocking operations are completely out of the question. Because a spin-lock spins rather than blocking under contention, a deadlock will manifest as a spiked CPU and system-wide performance degradation, and therefore is a much more serious bug than a typical hang.
Whenever you use a spin lock you are making a bold statement about your code and thread interactions: it is more profitable for other contending threads to possibly waste CPU cycles than to wait and let other work make forward progress. If this statement turns out to be wrong, a large number of cycles will frequently get thrown away due to spinning, and the overall throughput of the system will suffer. On servers the result could be catastrophic and you may cost your customers money due to an impact to the achievable throughput. Each cycle you waste in a loop waiting for a spin lock to become available is one that could have been used to make forward progress in the app.
33. Consider a low-lock data structure for hot queues and stacks.
Windows has a set of ‘S-List’ APIs that provide a way to do “lock free” pushes and pops from a stack data structure. This can lead to highly scalable, non-blocking algorithms, much in the same way that spin-locks do. Unfortunately it is not a simple matter to use ‘S-Lists’ from managed code, due to the requirements for memory pinning among other things. It’s very easy to build a lock-free stack out of CAS operations which is suitable for these situations. The algorithm goes something like this:
class LockFreeStack<T> {
class Node {
T m_obj;
Node m_next;
}private Node m_head;
void Push(T obj) {
Node n = new Node(obj);
Node h;
do {
h = m_head;
n.m_next = h;
} while (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref m_head, n, h) != h);
}T Pop() {
Node h;
Node nh;
do {
h = m_head;
nh = h.m_next;
} while (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref m_head, nh, h) != h);
return h.m_obj;
}
}This sample implementation carefully avoids the well-known ABA problem as a result of two things: (1) it assumes a GC, ensuring memory isn’t reclaimed and reused so long as at least one thread has a reference to it; and (2) we don’t make any attempt to pool nodes. A more efficient solution might pool nodes so that each Push doesn’t have to allocate one, but then would have to also implement an ABA-safe algorithm. This is typically done by widening the target of the CAS so that it can contain a version number in addition to the “next node” reference.
There are other permutations of this lock-free data structure pattern which can be useful. Lock-free queues can be built (see Michael, 96 for an example algorithm), permitting concurrent access to both ends of the data structure. All of the same caveats explained with the earlier lock free item apply.
34. Always use the CLR thread pool or IO Completion mechanisms to introduce concurrency.
The CLR’s thread pool is optimized to ensure good scalability across an entire process. If we end up with multiple custom pools in a process, they will compete for CPUs, over-create threads, and generally lead to scalability degradation. We already (unfortunately) have this situation with the OS’s thread pool competing with the CLR’s. We’d prefer not to have three or more. If you will be in the same process as the CLR, you should use our thread pool too. We’re doing a lot of work over the next couple releases to improve scalability and introduce new features—including substantially improved throughput (available in the last Orcas CTP)—so if it still doesn’t suit your purposes we would certainly like to hear from you.
Blocking
35. Document latency expectations for your users.
We haven’t yet come up with a consistent way to describe the performance characteristics of managed APIs. When writing concurrent software, however, it’s frequently very important for developers to understand and reason about the performance of the dependencies they choose to take. This includes things like knowing the probability of blocking—and therefore whether to try and mask latency by transferring work to a separate thread, overlapping IO, and so on—as well as the compute and memory intensiveness of the internal operations. Please make an effort to document such things. Incremental and steady improvements are important in this area.
36. Use the Asynchronous Programming Model (APM) to supply async versions of blocking APIs.
Particularly if you are building a feature that mimics existing Win32 IO APIs or uses such APIs heavily, you should also consider exposing the built-in asynchronous nature of IO on Windows. For example, file and network IO is highly asynchronous in the OS; if you know your API will spend any measurable portion of its execution time blocked waiting for IO, the same customers who use asynchronous file IO APIs will want some way to turn that into asynchronous IO. The only way they can do that is if you go the extra step and provide an Asynchronous Programming Model (APM) version of your API.
Details on precisely how to implement the APM are available in Cwalina, 05. It involves adding ‘IAsyncResult BeginXX(params, AsyncCallback, object)’ and ‘rettype EndXX(IAsyncResult) APIs for your ‘rettype XX(params)’ method. As an example, consider System.IO.Stream:
int Read(byte[] buffer, int offset, int count);
IAsyncResult BeginRead(byte[] buffer, int offset, int count,
AsyncCallback callback, object state);
int EndRead(IAsyncResult asyncResult);A good hard-and-fast rule is that if you use an API that offers an asynchronous version, then you too should offer an asynchronous version (and so on, recursively up the call stack).
This is very important to many app developers who need to tightly control the amount of concurrency on the machine. Having lots of IO happening asynchronously can permit operations to overlap in ways they couldn’t otherwise, therefore improving the throughput at which the work is retired. IO Completion Ports, for example, allow highly scalable asynchronous IO without having to introduce additional threads. There is simply no way to build a robust and scalable server program without them. If the library doesn’t expose this capability, customers are left with a clumsy design: they have to manually marshal work to a thread pool thread—or one of their own—to mask the latency, and then rendezvous with it later on. And this doesn’t work at all for massive numbers of in-flight IO requests. Or even worse, users are forced to create, maintain, and use their own incarnations of existing library APIs.
37. Always block using one of these existing APIs: lock acquisition, WaitHandle.WaitOne, WaitAny, WaitAll, Thread.Sleep, or Thread.Join.
The CLR doesn’t block in a straightforward manner. As noted earlier, we use blocking as an opportunity to run the message loop on STA threads. We also call out to the host to give it a chance to switch fibers or perform any other sort of book-keeping. This is required to ensure good CPU utilization and to achieve the goal of having all CPUs constantly busy on a MP machine, instead of the alternative of wasting potential execution time by letting threads block. P/Invoking or COM interoping to a blocking API completely bypasses this machinery, and we are then at the mercy of that API’s implementation. Aside from the thread switching problems, if this API blocks but doesn’t pump messages on an STA, for instance, we may end up in a cross-apartment deadlock, among other problems.
III. References
[Brumme, 03] Brumme, C. AppDomains (“application domains”). Blog article. June 2003.
[Cwalina, 05] Cwalina, K., Abrams, B. Framework design guidelines: Conventions, idioms, and patterns for reusable .NET libraries. Addison-Wesley Professional. September 2005.
[Duffy, 05] Duffy, J. Atomicity and asynchronous exceptions. Blog article. March 2005.
[Duffy, 06] Duffy, J. Broken variants of double-checked locking. Blog article. January 2006.
[Duffy, 06b] Duffy, J. No more hangs: Advanced techniques to avoid and detect deadlocks in .NET apps. MSDN Magazine. April 2006.
[Duffy, 06c] Duffy. J. Application responsiveness: Using concurrency to enhance user experiences. Dr. Dobb’s Journal. September 2006.
[Michael, 96] Michael, M., Scott, M. Simple, Fast, and Practical Non-blocking and Blocking Concurrent Queue Algorithms. PODC’06.
[Morrison, 05] Morrison, V. Understand the impact of low-lock techniques in multithreaded apps. MSDN Magazine. October 2005.
[Olukotun, 05] Olukotun, K., Hammond, L. The future of microprocessors. ACM queue, vol. 3, no. 7. September 2005.
[Sutter, 05] Sutter, H., Larus, J. Software and the concurrency revolution. ACM queue, vol. 3, no. 7. September 2005.
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