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gh-128807: Add marking phase for free-threaded cyclic GC #128808

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merged 20 commits into from
Jan 15, 2025

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@nascheme nascheme commented Jan 14, 2025

This is conceptually similar to the phase that was added to the non-free-threaded GC. Start with a set of known root objects, like sysdict and mark all objects reachable from those (revealed by the tp_traverse method) as "alive". We know anything marked alive cannot be garbage and can be excluded from the regular cyclic GC process. For most programs, this saves a moderate amount of computation since the marking pass is relatively cheaper per object.

If gc.freeze() is used, it's unlikely that this marking phase will be a win since it's expected that the majority of objects will be frozen. Disable the marking phase if freeze is used.

See gh-126491 for the non-free-threaded version of this technique.

pyperformance results vs merge base. I suspect the slowdown on some benchmarks is not real. For example, regex_v8 should not be slower.

Here are the pyperformance results for a bare-metal AMD Ryzen machine. It does not show a slowdown on regex_v8, for example.

To better show the expected improvement, I ran a "sphinx build" benchmark, like in gh-124567. Results are:

old new
GC collections 38 38
long-lived objects 586,986 585,730
total run time 3.24 s 3.03 s
mark phase time 0.00 s 0.16 s
total gc time 0.72 s 0.57 s

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cpython-cla-bot bot commented Jan 14, 2025

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If the object is already marked as reachable, we shouldn't traverse it
again.
These are not strictly needed, simplify PR.
More code cleanup (better names, comments, simplify error handling).
Fix bug in that "alive" bit must be checked in mark_alive_stack_push()
to avoid visiting already visited objects.
Make sure we still do this optimization.  There is also a unit test that
checks for this.
Reduces duplicate code.
@nascheme nascheme force-pushed the nogil-gc-mark-alive branch from ccc5a11 to 680f80f Compare January 14, 2025 01:10
@nascheme nascheme marked this pull request as ready for review January 14, 2025 18:12
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Looks great! A few comments below

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Use gc_abort_mark_alive() helper in case of OOM.  In addition to
freeing the stack, we need to ensure that no object has the alive bit
set on it.  This also adding missing error handling in the case that
propagate_alive_bits() fails.
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LGTM

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@nascheme nascheme merged commit 080f444 into python:main Jan 15, 2025
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3 participants