Feature #18589
Updated by kddnewton (Kevin Newton) over 3 years ago
This is related to https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/5433.
## Current behavior
Caches depend on a global counter. All constant mutations cause all caches to be invalidated.
```ruby
class A
B = 1
end
def foo
A::B # inline cache depends on global counter
end
foo # populate inline cache
foo # hit inline cache
C = 1 # global counter increments, all caches are invalidated
foo # misses inline cache due to `C = 1`
```
## Proposed behavior
Caches depend on name components. Only constant mutations with corresponding names will invalidate the cache.
```ruby
class A
B = 1
end
def foo
A::B # inline cache depends constants named "A" and "B"
end
foo # populate inline cache
foo # hit inline cache
C = 1 # caches that depend on the name "C" are invalidated
foo # hits inline cache because IC only depends on "A" and "B"
```
Examples of breaking the new cache:
```ruby
module C
# Breaks `foo` cache because "A" constant is set and the cache in foo depends
# on "A" and "B"
class A; end
end
B = 1
```
We expect the new cache scheme to be invalidated less often because names aren't frequently reused. With the cache being invalidated less, we can rely on its stability more to keep our constant references fast and reduce the need to throw away generated code in YJIT.
## Performance benchmarks
The following benchmark (included in this pull request) performs about 2x faster than master.
```ruby
CONSTANT1 = 1
CONSTANT2 = 1
CONSTANT3 = 1
CONSTANT4 = 1
CONSTANT5 = 1
def constants
[CONSTANT1, CONSTANT2, CONSTANT3, CONSTANT4, CONSTANT5]
end
500_000.times do
constants
INVALIDATE = true
end
```
In terms of macro benchmarks, I ran with this code on railsbench and there was not a statistically significant different in startup time or overall runtime performance.
@byroot also ran performance benchmarks on our production application. He noticed that there were several cache busts related to Object#extend (from core libraries), ActiveRecord::Relation#extending (from Rails), and autoload (from various gems, both internal and external). After a lot of work, the cache busts went down:
but they're still frequent enough that it's a problem. These changes had a measurable performance difference in request speed:
## Memory benchmarks
In terms of memory, this includes an increase in VM size by about 500KiB when running on railsbench. This is because we're now tracking cache associations ({ ID => IC[] }) on the VM to know how to invalidate specific caches when constants change.
I booted Shopify's core monolith with this branch as well. It increased total retained memory from 1.23Gb to 1.3Gb (about a 0.7% increase). The memory increase is proportional to the number of constant caches found in the application. For each constant cache 1 level deep (e.g., `Foo`) the increase is about 33 bytes. For a constant cache 2 levels deep (e.g., `Foo::Bar`) the increase is about 67 bytes.