The first working multi-threaded qp-trie was stuck with an unpleasant
trade-off:
* Use `isc_rwlock`, which has acceptable write performance, but
terrible read scalability because the qp-trie made all accesses
through a single lock.
* Use `liburcu`, which has great read scalability, but terrible
write performance, because I was relying on `rcu_synchronize()`
which is rather slow. And `liburcu` is LGPL.
To get the best of both worlds, we need our own scalable read side,
which we now have with `isc_qsbr`. And we need to modify the write
side so that it is not blocked by readers.
Better write performance requires an async cleanup function like
`call_rcu()`, instead of the blocking `rcu_synchronize()`. (There
is no blocking cleanup in `isc_qsbr`, because I have concluded
that it would be an attractive nuisance.)
Until now, all my multithreading qp-trie designs have been based
around two versions, read-only and mutable. This is too few to
work with asynchronous cleanup. The bare minimum (as in epoch
based reclamation) is three, but it makes more sense to support an
arbitrary number. Doing multi-version support "properly" makes
fewer assumptions about how safe memory reclamation works, and it
makes snapshots and rollbacks simpler.
To avoid making the memory management even more complicated, I
have introduced a new kind of "packed reader node" to anchor the
root of a version of the trie. This is simpler because it re-uses
the existing chunk lifetime logic - see the discussion under
"packed reader nodes" in `qp_p.h`.
I have also made the chunk lifetime logic simpler. The idea of a
"generation" is gone; instead, chunks are either mutable or
immutable. And the QSBR phase number is used to indicate when a
chunk can be reclaimed.
Instead of the `shared_base` flag (which was basically a one-bit
reference count, with a two version limit) the base array now has a
refcount, which replaces the confusing ad-hoc lifetime logic with
something more familiar and systematic.
Adjust the dns_qp_memusage() and dns_qp_compact() functions
to be more informative and flexible about handling fragmentation.
Avoid wasting space in runt chunks.
Switch from twigs_mutable() to cells_immutable() because that is the
sense we usually want.
Drop the redundant evacuate() function and rename evacuate_twigs() to
evacuate(). Move some chunk test functions closer to their point of
use.
Clarify compact_recursive(). Some small cleanups to comments.
Use isc_time_monotonic() for qp-trie timing stats.
Use #define constants to control debug logging.
Set up DNS name label offsets in dns_qpkey_fromname() so it is easier
to use in cases where the name is not fully hydrated.
The main benchmark is `qpmulti`, which exercizes the qp-trie
transactional API with differing numbers of threads and differing data
sizes, to get some idea of how its performance scales.
The `load-names` benchmark compares the times to populate and query
and the memory used by various BIND data structures: qp-trie, hash
table (chained), hash map (closed), and red-black tree.
The `qp-dump` program is a test utility rather than a benchmark. It
populates a qp-trie and prints it out, either in an ad-hoc text
format, or as input to the graphviz `dot` program.
