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Either optimize yield_briefly or de-optimize yield_briefly_no_cancel #70

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njsmith opened this issue Mar 3, 2017 · 3 comments
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@njsmith
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njsmith commented Mar 3, 2017

Right now yield_briefly_no_cancel has a special-case implementation in the run loop, while yield_briefly is implemented like (schematically):

with open_cancel_scope(deadline=-inf):
    await yield_indefinitely(lambda _: Abort.SUCCEEDED)

It was done this way because at the time I wrote them, yield_briefly_no_cancel couldn't be implemented any other way. But in the mean time we gained shielding, so now it could be

with open_cancel_scope(deadline=-inf, shield=True):
    await yield_indefinitely(lambda _: Abort.SUCCEEDED)

This is kinda weird and awkward. I'm not sure which way to standardize, though. yield_briefly_no_cancel is currently much faster than yield_briefly, because setting up and tearing down a cancel scope with a non-trivial deadline has non-trivial costs (at least compared to the other costs for these tiny operations). But the implementation is definitely more complicated. So we should decide whether we want to optimize yield_briefly, or de-optimize yield_briefly_no_cancel.

@belm0
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belm0 commented Sep 22, 2018

+100 for the faster implementation, and allowing sleep(0) and checkpoint() to benefit.

Trio takes on this complexity, and countless CPU cycles in the universe are spared.

@belm0
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belm0 commented Sep 30, 2018

note from gitter, as the cited function names have changed

right now cancel_shielded_checkpoint is implemented using a special-case in the task suspend/resume logic: see here and here

but checkpoint is implemented in a naive way, using a regular cancel scope that expires immediately

oremanj added a commit to oremanj/trio that referenced this issue Feb 6, 2019
Relevant to python-trio#886, python-trio#606, python-trio#285, python-trio#147, python-trio#70, python-trio#58, maybe others.

I was continuing my effort to shoehorn linked cancel scopes and graceful cancellation into `CancelScope` earlier today and it was feeling too much of a mess, so I decided to explore other options. This PR is the result. It makes major changes to Trio's cancellation internals, but barely any to Trio's cancellation semantics -- all tests pass except for one that is especially persnickety about `cancel_called`. No new tests or docs yet as I wanted to get feedback on the approach before polishing.

An overview:
* New class `CancelBinding` manages a single lexical context (a `with` block or a task) that might get a different cancellation treatment than its surroundings. "All plumbing, no policy."
* Each cancel binding has an effective deadline, a _single_ task, and links to parent and child bindings. Each parent lexically encloses its children. The only cancel bindings with multiple children are the ones immediately surrounding nurseries, and they have one child binding per nursery child task plus maybe one in the nested child.
* Each cancel binding calculates its effective deadline based on its parent's effective deadline and some additional data. The actual calculation is performed by an associated `CancelLogic` instance (a small ABC).
* `CancelScope` now implements `CancelLogic`, providing the deadline/shield semantics we know and love. It manages potentially-multiple `CancelBinding`s.
* Cancel stacks are gone. Instead, each task has an "active" (innermost) cancel binding, which changes as the task moves in and out of cancellation regions. The active cancel binding's effective deadline directly determines whether and when `Cancelled` is raised in the task.
* `Runner.deadlines` stores tasks instead of cancel scopes. There is no longer a meaningful state of "deadline is in the past but scope isn't cancelled yet" (this is what the sole failing test doesn't like). If the effective deadline of a task's active cancel binding is non-infinite and in the future, it goes in Runner.deadlines. If it's in the past, the task has a pending cancellation by definition.

Potential advantages:
* Cancellation becomes extensible without changes to _core, via users writing their own CancelLogic and wrapping a core CancelBinding(s) around it. We could even move CancelScope out of _core if we want to make a point.
* Nursery.start() is much simpler.
* Splitting shielding into a separate object from cancellation becomes trivial (they'd be two kinds of CancelLogic).
* Most operations that are performed frequently take constant time: checking whether you're cancelled, checking what your deadline is, entering and leaving a cancel binding. I haven't benchmarked, so it's possible we're losing on constant factors or something, but in theory this should be faster than the old approach.
* Since tasks now have well-defined root cancel bindings, I think python-trio#606 becomes straightforward via providing a way to spawn a system task whose cancel binding is a child of something other than the system nursery's cancel binding.

Caveats:
* We call `current_time()` a lot. Not sure if this is worth worrying about, and could probably be cached if so.
* There are probably bugs, because aren't there always?

Current cancel logic:
```
    def compute_effective_deadline(
        self, parent_effective_deadline, parent_extra_info, task
    ):
        incoming_deadline = inf if self._shield else parent_effective_deadline
        my_deadline = -inf if self._cancel_called else self._deadline
        return min(incoming_deadline, my_deadline), parent_extra_info
```
Want to support a grace period? I'm pretty sure it would work with something like
```
    def compute_effective_deadline(
        self, parent_effective_deadline, parent_extra_info, task
    ):
        parent_cleanup_deadline = parent_extra_info.get("effective_cleanup_deadline", parent_effective_deadline)
        if self._shield:
            parent_effective_deadline = parent_cleanup_deadline = inf
        my_cleanup_start = min(self._deadline, self._cancel_called_at)
        merged_cleanup_deadline = min(parent_cleanup_deadline, my_cleanup_start + self._grace_period)
        my_extra_info = parent_extra_info.set("effective_cleanup_deadline", merged_cleanup_deadline)
        if self._shield_during_cleanup:
            effective_deadline = merged_cleanup_deadline
        else:
            effective_deadline = min(parent_effective_deadline, my_cleanup_start)
        return effective_deadline, my_extra_info
```
Maybe that's not quite _simple_ but it is miles better than what I was looking at before. :-)
@oremanj
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oremanj commented Jun 26, 2020

Fixed by #1613.

@oremanj oremanj closed this as completed Jun 26, 2020
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