It's not at all obvious to me that the way we use PCH is the right/best
way to use it. We dump every header we think it would be good to
precompile into precompiled.hpp and then only ask gcc to precompile it.
That results in a ~250MB file that has to be read into and processed for
every source file! That doesn't seem very efficient to me.
Cheers,
David
On 2/11/2018 3:18 AM, Erik Joelsson wrote:
Hello,
My point here, which wasn't very clear, is that Mac and Linux seem to
lose just as much real compile time. The big difference in these tests
was rather the number of cpus in the machine (32 threads in the linux
box vs 8 on the mac). The total amount of work done was increased when
PCH was disabled, that's the user time. Here is my theory on why the
real (wall clock) time was not consistent with user time between these
experiments can be explained:
With pch the time line (simplified) looks like this:
1. Single thread creating PCH
2. All cores compiling C++ files
When disabling pch it's just:
1. All cores compiling C++ files
To gain speed with PCH, the time spent in 1 much be less than the time
saved in 2. The potential time saved in 2 goes down as the number of
cpus go up. I'm pretty sure that if I repeated the experiment on Linux
on a smaller box (typically one we use in CI), the results would look
similar to Macosx, and similarly, if I had access to a much bigger mac,
it would behave like the big Linux box. This is why I'm saying this
should be done for both or none of these platforms.
In addition to this, the experiment only built hotspot. If you we would
instead build the whole JDK, then the time wasted in 1 in the PCH case
would be negated to a large extent by other build targets running
concurrently, so for a full build, PCH is still providing value.
The question here is that if the value of PCH isn't very big, perhaps
it's not worth it if it's also creating as much grief as described here.
There is no doubt that there is value however. And given the examination
done by Magnus, it seems this value could be increased.
The main reason why we haven't disabled PCH in CI before this. We really
really want to get CI builds fast. We don't have a ton of over capacity
to just throw at it. PCH made builds faster, so we used them. My other
reason is consistency between builds. Supporting multiple different
modes of building creates the potential for inconsistencies. For that
reason I would definitely not support having PCH on by default, but
turned off in our CI/dev-submit. We pick one or the other as the
official build configuration, and we stick with the official build
configuration for all builds of any official capacity (which includes CI).
In the current CI setup, we have a bunch of tiers that execute one after
the other. The jdk-submit currently only runs tier1. In tier2 I've put
slowdebug builds with PCH disabled, just to help verify a common
developer configuration. These builds are not meant to be used for
testing or anything like that, they are just run for verification, which
is why this is ok. We could argue that it would make sense to move the
linux-x64-slowdebug without pch build to tier1 so that it's included in
dev-submit.
/Erik
On 2018-11-01 03:38, Magnus Ihse Bursie wrote:
On 2018-10-31 00:54, Erik Joelsson wrote:
Below are the corresponding numbers from a Mac, (Mac Pro (Late 2013),
3.7 GHz, Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5, 16 GB). To be clear, the -npch is
without precompiled headers. Here we see a slight degradation when
disabling on both user time and wall clock time. My guess is that the
user time increase is about the same, but because of a lower cpu
count, the extra load is not as easily covered.
These tests were run with just building hotspot. This means that the
precompiled header is generated alone on one core while nothing else
is happening, which would explain this degradation in build speed. If
we were instead building the whole product, we would see a better
correlation between user and real time.
Given the very small benefit here, it could make sense to disable
precompiled headers by default for Linux and Mac, just as we did with
ccache.
I do know that the benefit is huge on Windows though, so we cannot
remove the feature completely. Any other comments?
Well, if you show that it is a loss in time on macosx to disable
precompiled headers, and no-one (as far as I've seen) has complained
about PCH on mac, then why not keep them on as default there? That the
gain is small is no argument to lose it. (I remember a time when you
were hunting seconds in the build time ;-))
On linux, the story seems different, though. People experience PCH as
a problem, and there is a net loss of time, at least on selected
testing machines. It makes sense to turn it off as default, then.
/Magnus
/Erik
macosx-x64
real 4m13.658s
user 27m17.595s
sys 2m11.306s
macosx-x64-npch
real 4m27.823s
user 30m0.434s
sys 2m18.669s
macosx-x64-debug
real 5m21.032s
user 35m57.347s
sys 2m20.588s
macosx-x64-debug-npch
real 5m33.728s
user 38m10.311s
sys 2m27.587s
macosx-x64-slowdebug
real 3m54.439s
user 25m32.197s
sys 2m8.750s
macosx-x64-slowdebug-npch
real 4m11.987s
user 27m59.857s
sys 2m18.093s
On 2018-10-30 14:00, Erik Joelsson wrote:
Hello,
On 2018-10-30 13:17, Aleksey Shipilev wrote:
On 10/30/2018 06:26 PM, Ioi Lam wrote:
Is there any advantage of using precompiled headers on Linux?
I have measured it recently on shenandoah repositories, and
fastdebug/release build times have not
improved with or without PCH. Actually, it gets worse when you
touch a single header that is in PCH
list, and you end up recompiling the entire Hotspot. I would be in
favor of disabling it by default.
I just did a measurement on my local workstation (2x8 cores x2 ht
Ubuntu 18.04 using Oracle devkit GCC 7.3.0). I ran "time make
hotspot" with clean build directories.
linux-x64:
real 4m6.657s
user 61m23.090s
sys 6m24.477s
linux-x64-npch
real 3m41.130s
user 66m11.824s
sys 4m19.224s
linux-x64-debug
real 4m47.117s
user 75m53.740s
sys 8m21.408s
linux-x64-debug-npch
real 4m42.877s
user 84m30.764s
sys 4m54.666s
linux-x64-slowdebug
real 3m54.564s
user 44m2.828s
sys 6m22.785s
linux-x64-slowdebug-npch
real 3m23.092s
user 55m3.142s
sys 4m10.172s
These numbers support your claim. Wall clock time is actually
increased with PCH enabled, but total user time is decreased. Does
not seem worth it to me.
It's on by default and we keep having
breakage where someone would forget to add #include. The latest
instance is JDK-8213148.
Yes, we catch most of these breakages in CIs. Which tells me adding
it to jdk-submit would cover
most of the breakage during pre-integration testing.
jdk-submit is currently running what we call "tier1". We do have
builds of Linux slowdebug with precompiled headers disabled in
tier2. We also build solaris-sparcv9 in tier1 which does not support
precompiled headers at all, so to not be caught in jdk-submit you
would have to be in Linux specific code. The example bug does not
seem to be that. Mach5/jdk-submit was down over the weekend and
yesterday so my suspicion is the offending code in this case was
never tested.
That said, given that we get practically no benefit from PCH on
Linux/GCC, we should probably just turn it off by default for Linux
and/or GCC. I think we need to investigate Macos as well here.
/Erik
-Aleksey
