While running benchmarks, a hang surfaced in timer-only workloads — actors
sleeping with no IO in flight. Tracing it down, the race lives in sleep():
between the call to `timers.insert_sleep` and the subsequent `park_current`
yield, the actor is still in State::Runnable. If the timer fires in that
window, the old code's `if matches!(slot.state, State::Parked)` guard silently
drops the wakeup. The actor then parks normally and never gets re-queued —
it sleeps forever.
The fix mirrors what scheduler::unpark() and the IO FdReady path already do:
when the timer fires and the slot is still Runnable, set `pending_unpark`
instead of re-queuing immediately. The upcoming Park yield sees the flag and
re-queues the actor rather than suspending it, closing the race without any
new synchronisation.
Adds a regression test: 100 actors doing pure timer sleeps across ≥2
scheduler threads. The test asserts both correctness (all actors complete)
and timeliness (wall time < 2×sleep duration), which is enough signal to
catch a stuck actor even on a single-core CI runner.
Three changes, each independently measured, landed together.
Fuse pre-resume mutex acquisitions
-----------------------------------
The schedule loop previously took the shared lock three separate times
per actor resume: once to pop the run queue, once to read the stack
pointer, and once to pop the first-resume closure. These are now a
single acquisition that returns everything needed to resume the actor.
As a side effect, pending_closures was changed from a Vec<(Pid, Closure)>
with O(n) linear scan to a Vec<Option<Closure>> indexed by slot index,
making first-closure lookup O(1).
Move stack allocation outside the shared lock
----------------------------------------------
Stack::new() (mmap + mprotect) was previously called inside with_shared,
stalling every other scheduler thread for the duration of two syscalls on
every spawn. It now runs before the lock is acquired.
Stack pool
----------
Rather than munmap-ing a stack when an actor finishes and mmap-ing a fresh
one on the next spawn, stacks are now recycled through a per-Runtime pool
(Mutex<Vec<Stack>>). finalize_actor extracts the stack from the Actor
before clearing the slot and pushes it to the pool outside the shared lock.
spawn_under pops from the pool before falling back to Stack::new().
The pool is unbounded for now (shrink policy TBD) but capped at
stack_pool_cap stacks on return, defaulting to thread_count * 4.
The cap is configurable via Config::stack_pool_cap(n).
Results (24-thread, against stored baseline)
--------------------------------------------
chained_spawn smarm 1-thread: 9763 → 261 µs (-97%)
chained_spawn smarm 24-thread: 23562 → 838 µs (-96%)
ping_pong_oneshot smarm 1-thread: 18409 → 742 µs (-96%)
ping_pong_oneshot smarm 24-thread: 44596 → 1425 µs (-97%)
catch_unwind_panics smarm 24-thread: 267812 → 124094 µs (-54%)
fan_out_compute smarm 24-thread: 2839 → 2226 µs (-22%)
Tokio regressions in the checker output are baseline measurement drift;
no tokio code was changed.
Config API changes (src/preempt.rs, src/runtime.rs):
- preempt: promote ALLOC_INTERVAL and TIMESLICE_CYCLES from bare consts to
DEFAULT_ALLOC_INTERVAL / DEFAULT_TIMESLICE_CYCLES; store active values in
thread-locals set on each actor resume so multiple runtimes can use
different settings concurrently.
- runtime: add alloc_interval / timeslice_cycles fields to Config; add
Config::alloc_interval(n) and Config::timeslice_cycles(c) builder methods;
thread the values through RuntimeInner to the reset_timeslice() call in
schedule_loop.
Bench changes:
- Add bench_cfg(threads) helper to general/tokio_favored/smarm_favored that
wraps Config::exact and reads SMARM_ALLOC_INTERVAL / SMARM_TIMESLICE_CYCLES
env vars, so the sweep script can vary knobs without recompiling.
Sweep tooling (benches/sweep.py):
- 'run': run the 3-file bench suite once; --save-baseline persists JSON
- 'regress': compare current run against baseline.json, exit 1 on any bench
that regresses >10% vs stored medians
- 'sweep': run the full SWEEP_GRID (10 points), print comparison table,
optional --save-csv; binaries pre-built so no recompile per point
Sweep results (10-point grid, 1-CPU sandbox):
- The preemption knobs have very little effect on this single-CPU machine.
Most benches move <5% across the entire grid.
- Longer timeslices (tc=600k, tc=1200k) reliably hurt spawn_storm_busy
(+11-15%) and catch_unwind_panics (+10-12%) because actors hold the
scheduler mutex longer per timeslice, stalling the storm of joinable tasks.
- Shorter timeslices (tc=150k) give a small improvement on many_timers
(-3-4%) and a wash everywhere else.
- yield_in_hot_loop and uncontended_channel are essentially flat across all
knobs — both are scheduling-dominated and call yield_now explicitly, so
the RDTSC-driven preemption path is irrelevant.
- Conclusion: the knobs matter primarily under contention (multi-core).
Re-run sweep on a multi-core machine before drawing tuning conclusions.
smarm