fix: idle workers must sleep while another worker is busy

The wait predicate was `stopped_ || total_ > 0`, and total_ counts queued
*plus executing*. So while any one task ran, every other worker's predicate
was true: wait() returned immediately and the worker spun through try_pop,
try_steal and back to wait at full speed, try_lock-ing every peer queue on
each pass.

Measured on this tree, 8 workers and one 300 ms task: 1991 ms of CPU and
19205 voluntary context switches, against 0.4 ms and 10 with the fix. Call it
six and a half cores burned for the duration of one sleeping task.

Sleeping requires "no work is *waiting*", which total_ cannot express, so
queued_ is now tracked separately: incremented on submit, decremented when a
task leaves a queue, and adjusted for the tasks stop() discards. total_ stays
as it was for drain(), which genuinely does need to know about executing work.
The worker exit condition moves to queued_ for the same reason — waiting for
total_ to reach zero meant waiting for someone else's task to finish, which a
worker cannot help with and would spin through until it did. PoolSnapshot's
queue depth stops being an estimate as a side effect.

Latent for this pipeline, where each node owns a private single-thread pool
and there is no idle peer to spin. Any use of a shared pool, which
make_pool_node exists for, hits it immediately.

Reproducing it needs the right trigger, and the test says so, because my first
attempt got it wrong and passed against the bug: a worker that has never been
woken stays blocked in wait() and never re-evaluates the predicate. The spin
only appears once a worker *finishes* something and re-enters the loop while a
peer is still busy, so the case submits one long task plus a trivial one per
remaining worker. Submitting only the long task measures nothing.

Verified in both directions: 1969 ms of CPU before, 0.35 ms after, against a
300 ms threshold. Full suite 142/142.
This commit is contained in:
2026-08-05 15:34:33 +02:00
parent 87c5f98d04
commit b9698fae60
2 changed files with 77 additions and 6 deletions
+56
View File
@@ -284,3 +284,59 @@ TEST_CASE("submitting while the pool stops does not crash", "[scheduler]") {
CHECK(pool.rejected() + pool.snapshot("p").tasks_completed <= 2000);
}
}
// Regression: idle workers must sleep while another worker is busy.
//
// The wait predicate was `stopped_ || total_ > 0`, and total_ counts queued
// *plus executing*. So while any one task ran, every other worker's predicate
// was true: wait() returned immediately and the worker spun through try_pop,
// try_steal and back to wait at full speed — try_lock-ing every peer queue on
// each pass. One slow task pinned every other core and contended the very
// mutexes the working thread needed to make progress.
//
// That is the shape of this pipeline's load exactly: a handful of nodes whose
// work is tens of milliseconds of ONNX inference. It was latent only because
// each node currently owns a private single-thread pool, where there is no
// idle peer to spin. Any use of a shared pool — which make_pool_node exists
// for — hits it immediately.
//
// Measured as CPU time rather than wall time, because the bug does not make
// anything slower to finish; it makes seven cores burn while one works. A
// sleeping task consumes no CPU, so with workers correctly asleep the whole
// pool should account for almost none.
TEST_CASE("idle workers do not spin while one task runs", "[scheduler]") {
auto cpu_ms = [] {
struct timespec ts{};
clock_gettime(CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID, &ts);
return ts.tv_sec * 1000.0 + ts.tv_nsec / 1e6;
};
constexpr int kThreads = 8;
constexpr int kWorkMs = 300;
ThreadPool pool(kThreads);
pool.start();
std::this_thread::sleep_for(20ms); // let workers reach the wait
const double before = cpu_ms();
// One long task plus a trivial one per remaining worker. The trivial ones
// matter: a worker that has never been woken stays blocked in wait() and
// never re-evaluates the predicate, so the spin only appears once a worker
// *finishes* something and re-enters the loop while a peer is still busy.
// Submitting only the long task does not reproduce it.
pool.submit([&] { std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::milliseconds(kWorkMs)); });
for (int i = 0; i < kThreads - 1; ++i) pool.submit([] {});
pool.drain();
const double used = cpu_ms() - before;
pool.stop();
// Measured on this tree: 1991 ms of CPU with the total_ predicate against
// 0.4 ms with queued_, and 19205 voluntary context switches against 10 —
// roughly (kThreads - 1) cores burned for the duration of one sleeping
// task. The threshold sits far from both so the case is not sensitive to
// how loaded the machine is.
INFO("cpu " << used << " ms over " << kWorkMs << " ms of sleeping work");
CHECK(used < kWorkMs);
}