atomic_queue

multiple-producer-multiple-consumer C++14 lock-free queues based on std::atomic<>.

The main design principle these queues adhere to is simplicity: fixed size buffer, the bare minimum of atomic operations.

These qualities are also limitations:

• The maximum queue size must be set at compile time (fastest) or construction time (slower).
• There are no blocking push/pop functions.

Nevertheless, ultra-low-latency applications need just that and nothing more. The simplicity pays off, see the throughput and latency benchmarks.

Available containers are:

• AtomicQueue - a fixed size ring-buffer for atomic elements.
• OptimistAtomicQueue - a faster fixed size ring-buffer for atomic elements which busy-waits when empty or full.
• AtomicQueue2 - a fixed size ring-buffer for non-atomic elements.
• OptimistAtomicQueue2 - a faster fixed size ring-buffer for non-atomic elements which busy-waits when empty or full.

These containers have corresponding AtomicQueueB, OptimistAtomicQueueB, AtomicQueueB2, OptimistAtomicQueueB2 versions where the buffer size is specified as an argument to the constructor. The B versions are slower.

Totally ordered mode is supported. In this mode consumers receive messages in the same FIFO order the messages were posted. This mode is supported for push and pop functions, but for not the try_ versions. On Intel x86 the totally ordered mode has 0 cost, as of 2019.

Single-producer-single-consumer mode is supported. In this mode, no read-modify-write instructions are necessary, only the atomic loads and stores. That improves queue throughput significantly.

A few well-known containers are used for reference in the benchmarks:

• boost::lockfree::spsc_queue - a wait-free single-producer-single-consumer queue from Boost library.
• boost::lockfree::queue - a lock-free multiple-producer-multiple-consumer queue from Boost library.
• pthread_spinlock - a locked fixed size ring-buffer with pthread_spinlock_t.
• moodycamel::ConcurrentQueue - a lock-free multiple-producer-multiple-consumer queue used in non-blocking mode.
• moodycamel::ReaderWriterQueue - a lock-free single-producer-single-consumer queue used in non-blocking mode.
• tbb::spin_mutex - a locked fixed size ring-buffer with tbb::spin_mutex from Intel Threading Building Blocks.
• tbb::speculative_spin_mutex - a locked fixed size ring-buffer with tbb::speculative_spin_mutex from Intel Threading Building Blocks. This type of mutex uses hardware lock elision based on Intel TSX extension, which is now known to be a good side-channel that bypasses memory protection, so that Intel recommends disabling TSX extension to mitigate. AMD CPUs don't support this extension. The benchmark for this queue type is going to be removed in the future.
• tbb::concurrent_bounded_queue - eponymous queue used in non-blocking mode from Intel Threading Building Blocks.

Build and run instructions

The containers provided are header-only class templates that require only #include <atomic_queue/atomic_queue.h>, no building/installing is necessary.

Building is necessary to run the tests and benchmarks.

git clone https://github.com/cameron314/concurrentqueue.git
git clone https://github.com/cameron314/readerwriterqueue.git
git clone https://github.com/max0x7ba/atomic_queue.git
cd atomic_queue
sudo hugeadm --pool-pages-min 1GB:1 --pool-pages-max 1GB:1 # Optional.
sudo cpupower frequency-set --related --governor performance # Optional.
make -r -j4 run_benchmarks

The benchmark also requires Intel TBB library to be available. It assumes that it is installed in /usr/local/include and /usr/local/lib. If it is installed elsewhere you may like to modify cppflags.tbb and ldlibs.tbb in Makefile.

API

The containers support the following APIs:

• try_push - Appends an element to the end of the queue. Returns false when the queue is full.
• try_pop - Removes an element from the front of the queue. Returns false when the queue is empty.
• push - Appends an element to the end of the queue. Busy waits when the queue is full. Faster than try_push when the queue is not full. Optional FIFO producer queuing and total order.
• pop - Removes an element from the front of the queue. Busy waits when the queue is empty. Faster than try_pop when the queue is not empty. Optional FIFO consumer queuing and total order.
• was_empty - Returns true if the container was empty during the call. The state may have changed by the time the return value is examined.
• was_full - Returns true if the container was full during the call. The state may have changed by the time the return value is examined.

TODO: full API reference.

Notes

The available queues here use a ring-buffer array for storing elements. The size of the queue is fixed at compile time or construction time.

In a production multiple-producer-multiple-consumer scenario the ring-buffer size should be set to the maximum allowable queue size. When the buffer size is exhausted it means that the consumers cannot consume the elements fast enough, fixing which would require either of:

• increasing the buffer size to be able to handle temporary spikes of produced elements, or
• increasing the number of consumers to consume elements faster, or
• decreasing the number of producers to producer fewer elements.

Using a power-of-2 ring-buffer array size allows a couple of important optimizations:

• The writer and reader indexes get mapped into the ring-buffer array index using modulo % SIZE binary operator and using a power-of-2 size turns that modulo operator into one plain and instruction and that is as fast as it gets.
• The element index within the cache line gets swapped with the cache line index within the ring-buffer array element index, so that subsequent queue elements actually reside in different cache lines. This eliminates contention between producers and consumers on the ring-buffer cache lines. Instead of N producers together with M consumers competing on the same ring-buffer array cache line in the worst case, it is only one producer competing with one consumer. This optimisation scales better with the number of producers and consumers, and element size. With low number of producers and consumers (up to about 2 of each in these benchmarks) disabling this optimisation may yield better throughput (but higher variance across runs).

The containers use unsigned type for size and internal indexes. On x86-64 platform unsigned is 32-bit wide, whereas size_t is 64-bit wide. 64-bit instructions utilise an extra byte instruction prefix resulting in slightly more pressure on the CPU instruction cache and the front-end. Hence, 32-bit unsigned indexes are used to maximise performance. That limits the queue size to 4,294,967,295 elements, which seems to be a reasonable hard limit for many applications.

Benchmarks

View throughput and latency benchmarks charts.

Methodology

There are a few OS behaviours that complicate benchmarking:

• CPU scheduler can place threads on different CPU cores each run. To avoid that the threads are pinned to specific CPU cores.
• CPU scheduler can preempt threads. To avoid that FIFO real-time priority 50 is used to disable scheduler time slicing and make the threads non-preemptable by lower priority processes/threads.
• Adverse address space randomisation may cause extra CPU cache conflicts. To minimise effects of that benchmarks executable is run at least 33 times and then the results with the highest throughput / lowest latency are selected.

I only have access to a few x86-64 machines. If you have access to different hardware feel free to submit the output file of scripts/run-benchmarks.sh and I will include your results into the benchmarks page.

Huge pages

When huge pages are available the benchmarks use 1x1GB or 16x2MB huge pages for the queues to minimise TLB misses. To enable huge pages do one of:

sudo hugeadm --pool-pages-min 1GB:1 --pool-pages-max 1GB:1
sudo hugeadm --pool-pages-min 2MB:16 --pool-pages-max 2MB:16

Throughput and scalability benchmark

N producer threads push a 4-byte integer into one queue, N consumer threads pop the integers from the queue. All producers posts 1,000,000 messages in total. Total time to send and receive all the messages is measured. The benchmark is run for from 1 producer and 1 consumer up to (total-number-of-cpus / 2) producers/consumers to measure the scalability of different queues.

Ping-pong benchmark

One thread posts an integer to another thread and waits for the reply using two queues. The benchmarks measures the total time of 100,000 ping-pongs, best of 10 runs. Contention is minimal here to be able to achieve and measure the lowest latency. Reports the average round-trip time.

Contributing

The project uses .editorconfig and .clang-format to automate formatting. Pull requests are expected to be formatted using these settings.

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Copyright (c) 2019 Maxim Egorushkin. MIT License. See the full licence in file LICENSE.