Hi,
As ruby threads are so called green threads, what’s the behaviour when
one thread is blocked on IO?
If the thread is blocked on a system call, is the whole process, ie
all threads blocked because the kernel scheduler considers the process
as blocked on IO? Are there IOs blocking a thread without blocking the
whole ruby process?
Thanks
Raphal
On Tue, 1 Mar 2011 17:45:26 +0900, Raphael B. [email protected]
wrote:
Raphaël
I’m new to threading, but from what I’ve been able to find, if the
currently active thread is blocked on IO, it should block the rest of
them.
At least, certain circumstances could cause that. According to (the
rather
old) post at
, it’s possible to block on IO. My own tests are unable to confirm that,
even for large test sizes. My guess is that in the 7ish years since that
post, many improvements have gone into the interpreter. 
The post at
has more information on ways of using them to not block each other.
Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide was
where I started for threading, but the only references I see to blocking
in
it talk about the Thread.critical= method.
has a nice synopsis of the threading types between ruby implementations.
Raphael B. [email protected] wrote:
Hi,
As ruby threads are so called green threads, what’s the behaviour when
one thread is blocked on IO?
They’re only green threads on Ruby 1.8, 1.9 uses native threads.
If the thread is blocked on a system call, is the whole process, ie
all threads blocked because the kernel scheduler considers the process
as blocked on IO? Are there IOs blocking a thread without blocking the
whole ruby process?
1.8 will schedule other threads if the blocking IO is for a socket/pipe
and uses the normal Ruby IO interfaces (or the extension author was
careful). Filesystem I/O (including NFS) can block the entire process
in 1.8.
On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 10:27 AM, Eric W. [email protected]
wrote:
1.8 will schedule other threads if the blocking IO is for a socket/pipe
and uses the normal Ruby IO interfaces (or the extension author was
careful). Filesystem I/O (including NFS) can block the entire process
in 1.8.
Where do you take that from? AFAIK internally Ruby 1.8.* uses non
blocking IO calls in combination with select() to be able to let other
threads work while IO is under way.
So: if IO blocks generally other threads continue to work - even on 1.8.
Cheers
robert
Robert K. [email protected] wrote:
1.8 will schedule other threads if the blocking IO is for a socket/pipe
and uses the normal Ruby IO interfaces (or the extension author was
careful). Filesystem I/O (including NFS) can block the entire process
in 1.8.Where do you take that from? AFAIK internally Ruby 1.8.* uses non
blocking IO calls in combination with select() to be able to let other
threads work while IO is under way.
Yes, I meant “blocking” from a user-visible perspective, not from a
kernel perspective. If there’s an EAGAIN it’ll block the current thread
from a user perspective and schedule others using select(), but not
actually block on the syscall that caused EAGAIN.
On 03/01/2011 08:16 PM, Eric W. wrote:
Yes, I meant “blocking” from a user-visible perspective, not from a
kernel perspective. If there’s an EAGAIN it’ll block the current thread
from a user perspective and schedule others using select(), but not
actually block on the syscall that caused EAGAIN.
OK, but earlier you said that file system IO can block the entire
process - which is not exactly true and also does not match what you
said now. 
Cheers
robert
Robert K. [email protected] wrote:
Yes, I meant “blocking” from a user-visible perspective, not from a
kernel perspective. If there’s an EAGAIN it’ll block the current thread
from a user perspective and schedule others using select(), but not
actually block on the syscall that caused EAGAIN.OK, but earlier you said that file system IO can block the entire
process - which is not exactly true and also does not match what you
said now.
Filesystem IO (regular files) doesn’t return EAGAIN (at least not on
systems I’m familiar with).
On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 11:13 PM, Eric W. [email protected]
wrote:
threads work while IO is under way.
Filesystem IO (regular files) doesn’t return EAGAIN (at least not on
systems I’m familiar with).
http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online/pages/man2/read.2.html#ERRORS
robert
Robert K. [email protected] wrote:
On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 11:13 PM, Eric W. [email protected] wrote:
Filesystem IO (regular files) doesn’t return EAGAIN (at least not on
systems I’m familiar with).
From
http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online/pages/man2/read.2.html#NOTES
Many file systems and disks were considered to be fast enough
that the implementation of O_NONBLOCK was deemed unnecessary.
So, O_NONBLOCK may not be available on files and/or disks.
From what I’ve seen, setting O_NONBLOCK doesn’t error, but read() never
actually respects it on ext{2,3,4} even when a disk is horribly slow.
Eric W. wrote:
Raphael B. [email protected] wrote:
As ruby threads are so called green threads, what’s the behaviour when
one thread is blocked on IO?
They’re only green threads on Ruby 1.8, 1.9 uses native threads.
That’s not true. The vast majority of Ruby 1.8 implementations use
native threads, and I think there is at least one Ruby 1.9
implementation which uses green threads.
jwm
On 02.03.2011 22:30, Jrg W Mittag wrote:
Eric W. wrote:
Raphael B.[email protected] wrote:
As ruby threads are so called green threads, what’s the behaviour when
one thread is blocked on IO?
They’re only green threads on Ruby 1.8, 1.9 uses native threads.That’s not true. The vast majority of Ruby 1.8 implementations use
native threads, and I think there is at least one Ruby 1.9
implementation which uses green threads.
Really? Which are those?
Cheers
robert
Robert K. wrote:
On 02.03.2011 22:30, Jörg W Mittag wrote:
Eric W. wrote:
Raphael B.[email protected] wrote:
As ruby threads are so called green threads, what’s the behaviour when
one thread is blocked on IO?
They’re only green threads on Ruby 1.8, 1.9 uses native threads.
That’s not true. The vast majority of Ruby 1.8 implementations use
native threads, and I think there is at least one Ruby 1.9
implementation which uses green threads.
Really? Which are those?
Ruby 1.8 implementations which use native threads:
As for a Ruby 1.9 implementation that uses green threads, I distinctly
remember reading about one, but I forgot which one. There’s so many
Ruby implementations right now that it’s hard to keep track of which
ones are 1.8 or 1.9 (or both), which ones have native threads or green
threads, which ones have concurrent threads or serialized threads.
(Interestingly, I haven’t seen any implementations with concurrent
green threads, which IMO is the best kind of threads. Rubinius
originally planned to do concurrent green threads, but they never did.
They started off with serialized green threads, then switched to
serialized native threads and are currently in the process of
switching to concurrent native threads.)
jwm
2011/3/6 Charles Oliver N. [email protected]:
native threads, so you can get concurrency but also lightweight
threading), but as far as I know they all abandoned it due to the
overhead of managing both concurrency and lightweight thread contexts.
It would also seem inefficient from the point of view that the OS does
already do all the tasks necessary for thread scheduling. So adding
another layer which duplicates these things would really only make
sense if the scheduling inside the process could benefit from
knowledge about the application’s (Ruby interpreter in this case)
behavior and thus yield significantly better results than relying on
OS scheduling does. But, as you said, it’s really the question
whether there is a runtime benefit and whether it’s worth the added
complexity in the interpreter.
If there are any green-threaded JVMs out there, it’s likely they’re
too slow to be useful; native JIT is hard to implement atop green
threads, so green-threaded JVMs in the past were mostly interpreted.
Thanks for all those insights, Charles and Jrg!
Kind regards
robert
2011/3/5 Jörg W Mittag [email protected]:
(Interestingly, I haven’t seen any implementations with concurrent
green threads, which IMO is the best kind of threads. Rubinius
originally planned to do concurrent green threads, but they never did.
They started off with serialized green threads, then switched to
serialized native threads and are currently in the process of
switching to concurrent native threads.)
Some JVMs started out with M:N threading (which I think is what you
mean by concurrent green threads, i.e. M green threads mapped to N
native threads, so you can get concurrency but also lightweight
threading), but as far as I know they all abandoned it due to the
overhead of managing both concurrency and lightweight thread contexts.
If there are any green-threaded JVMs out there, it’s likely they’re
too slow to be useful; native JIT is hard to implement atop green
threads, so green-threaded JVMs in the past were mostly interpreted.
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