Re: Subtle H2 performance degradation in 8.7.1 vs 8.6.0

From: Dmitry Karpov via curl-library <curl-library_at_lists.haxx.se>
Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2024 19:30:31 +0000

Hi Stefan,

Thanks for explanations!
In my opinion, the buffering option to minimize a number of write callbacks for some applications that may be negatively affected by it, would make sense.

While some applications indeed need to get incoming data as soon as possible, it may be better for some other applications to get bigger chunks of data from libcurl
via such an option (sacrificing a bit of memory for performance's sake) and mitigate issues with frequent write callback calls.

Alternative callback helping to implement custom buffering would also help, but I think having a simple option is probably more attractive for most of users
than implementing custom buffering mechanism (which will also use some additional memory).

Thanks,
Dmitry Karpov


-----Original Message-----
From: Stefan Eissing <stefan_at_eissing.org>
Sent: Monday, April 1, 2024 6:53 AM
To: libcurl development <curl-library_at_lists.haxx.se>
Cc: Dmitry Karpov <dkarpov_at_roku.com>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: Subtle H2 performance degradation in 8.7.1 vs 8.6.0

Hi Dmitry,

we were discussing this in the project when I introduced the change. The advantage of writing
HTTP/2 data frames directly is that curl does not buffering and less memory (way less in some cases).

The disadvantage, as you noticed, is that applications are called much more often. We thought about adding optional buffering in curl, but decided against it - for now. Many applications need to see response data as soon as possible, so it would need to be opt-in.

I think it would be more beneficial to provide an alternate callback to CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION that also gets an "End-of-Stream" flag and a "Flush" behaviour, so applications can implelement some easy buffering according to their needs.

Kind Regards,
Stefan

> Am 29.03.2024 um 23:47 schrieb Dmitry Karpov via curl-library <curl-library_at_lists.haxx.se>:
>
> Hi All,
>
> Trying 8.7.1 and TOT, I discovered a subtle performance degradation for H2 transfers vs 8.6.0, which I would like to report.
>
> It is subtle because it is mostly visible on low-end hardware platforms with weak CPUs in cases when a client application needs to perform heavy processing of incoming data (i.e. JSON parsing and processing).
> I stepped on small performance degradation with 8.7.1 when I analyzed overall H2 transfer time metrics in my application which included total transfer process time (download + processing).
>
> As it turned out, 8.7.1 (and TOT) processes H2 transfers with a larger number of write callbacks than 8.6.0, and with smaller chunk sizes.
>
> Here is the illustration for two H2 multiplexed 1MB transfers downloaded over LAN:
>
> 8.6.0, 2 H2, LAN: **** chunks=134, min_size=36, max_size=16384, avg_size=15650, time=32ms,
> <size:count map> [36:1, 117:1, 149:1, 230:1, 567:2, 16100:2,
> 16375:122, 16384:4]
>
> 8.7.1, 2 H2, LAN: **** chunks =146, min_size=45, max_size=16375, avg_size=14364, time=36ms,
> <size:count map> [45:8, 158:8, 576:2, 16217:8, 16330:8,
> 16375:112]
>
> As we can see from the example data, 8.7.1 had smaller data chunks on
> average (14364 vs 15650), the total number of chunks was greater (146 vs 134), and the full CURL_MAX_WRITE_SIZE (16384) was never used.
>
> (A similar picture if I use just one H2 download and slower speeds).
>
> While it is not an issue for fast CPUs, a bigger number of write callbacks with smaller sizes might affect overall transfer performance on slow CPUs.
> So, I thought it could be helpful to provide feedback from this perspective.
>
> Thanks,
> Dmitry Karpov
>
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Received on 2024-04-02