[racket] Futures and shared data structure

On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 1:02 PM, Eduardo Bellani <ebellani at gmail.com> wrote:
> My output to your suggested approach is
>
> GC [minor] at 1514740 bytes; 818464 collected in 4 msec
> GC [minor] at 2142928 bytes; 678980 collected in 4 msec
> GC [minor] at 4424700 bytes; 1509104 collected in 12 msec
> GC [minor] at 4999304 bytes; 614508 collected in 16 msec
> GC [minor] at 8337384 bytes; 1957728 collected in 20 msec
> GC [minor] at 10529324 bytes; 1709172 collected in 24 msec
> GC [minor] at 14245196 bytes; 2815768 collected in 28 msec
> GC [minor] at 19109972 bytes; 4515808 collected in 48 msec
> GC [minor] at 20287336 bytes; 4153060 collected in 32 msec
> GC [minor] at 416134292 bytes; -27108 collected in 1652 msec
> cpu time: 2660 real time: 2657 gc time: 1652
> cpu time: 1000 real time: 1001 gc time: 0
> 2 success(es) 0 failure(s) 0 error(s) 2 test(s) run
> 0
>
> Which for me is not helpful. Any more suggestions?

I get the following line of output (in the development version):

  future: 0 waiting for runtime at 1292881244093.291016: values

and, sure enough, looking at the expansion of the loop:

  (for ([i (in-vector some-data)]) i)

I see that it uses multiple values which, I believe are not safe for futures.

I believe that this is a recent change and hopefully whoever did it
will fix it (I'll post separately about this). But in the meantime,
the program below produces these two 'time' lines for me:

  cpu time: 1586 real time: 845 gc time: 0
  cpu time: 1596 real time: 1595 gc time: 0

which indicates that the two loops happened in parallel in the first
case and not in the second.

Robby

#lang racket

(require racket/future
         rackunit
         rackunit/text-ui
         racket/fixnum)

(define DATA (make-vector 99999999 'datum))

(define-test-suite read-from-shared
  (test-suite "with futures"
              (check-equal?
               (time (let ([f (future (λ () (read-data DATA)))])
                       (read-data DATA)
                       (touch f)))
               (void)))

  (test-suite "no futures"
              (check-equal?
               (time (read-data DATA)
                     (read-data DATA))
               (void))))

(define (read-data some-data)
  (let ([end (vector-length some-data)])
    (let loop ([i 0])
      (unless (fx= i end)
        (vector-ref some-data i)
        (loop (fx+ i 1))))))

(collect-garbage) (collect-garbage)
(run-tests read-from-shared)