So this is one of the reasons I find your patch to be problematic: it isn’t fixing N^2 behavior, it is merely changing one N^2 situation for another. AFAICT there are one of two possible cases in these sorts of transformations:
- These transformations are iteratively removing or inserting instructions, which invalidate the ordering with your approach, causing subsequent queries to rebuild the equivalent of OrderedBasicBlock.
I would say that this code fixes the quadratic behavior in practice, and lays the foundation to fix it permanently if it becomes a problem.
First, removing instructions doesn’t invalidate the ordering, and these passes mostly delete instructions, so in practice, the latent quadratic behavior is very hard to exercise.
In the future, if profiling shows that “insert;query;insert;query” is a bottleneck, we can fix it by leaving gaps in the numbering space and assigning new numbers halfway between adjacent instructions, renumbering as required to maintain amortized O(1) insertion complexity. I think it’s unlikely that we will ever need to implement this fancy renumbering algorithm, and people on the bug agree (https://llvm.org/pr38829#c2). Existing code that uses OrderedBasicBlock already doesn’t implement this algorithm. According to existing code, invalidating on modification is good enough.
- These transformations are not doing anything, in which case this is all wasted work.
As a next step, can you please instrument the calls to calls from DSE and/or memcpyopt and see how many of the ones for the huge basic blocks actually turn into a transformation in the code? If there are zero, then we should just disable these optimizations for large blocks. If there are a few improvements, then we should see how to characterize them and what the right solution is based on the sorts of information they need.
LLVM is occasionally maligned for the magic numbers like “6” in various optimizations that bound the work in various analyses (e.g. when computing masked bits) but they exist for very real reasons: the cases in which a large search will actually lead to benefits are marginal to non-existent, and the possibility for unbounded queries for core APIs cause all kinds of problems.
I see the dependence analysis queries as the same sort of situation: until something like MemorySSA is able to define away these dense queries, we should be using bounded searches (in this case larger than 6 but less than 11,000 :-).
It would be straight-forward to change llvm::BasicBlock to keep track of the number of instruction’s in it (doing so would not change any ilist algorithmic behavior that I’m aware of given the need to keep instruction parent pointers updated), and having that info would make it easy to cap linear passes like this or switch into local search modes.
The cost of such a thing is the risk of performance regressions. We control that risk by doing some analysis of the payoff of these transformations on large blocks - if the payoff doesn’t exist then it is a simple answer. The real question here is not whether DSE is able to eliminate a single store, it is whether eliminating that store actually leads to a measurable performance improvement in the generated code. Given huge blocks, I suspect the answer is “definitely not”.
As suggested in the bug, if we were to rewrite these passes to use MemorySSA, this bottleneck would go away. I rebased a patch to do that for DSE, but finishing it off and enabling it by default is probably out of scope for me.
Yes, understood, that would be a major change. That said, changing the entire architecture of the compiler to work around this isn’t really appealing to me, I’d rather limit the problematic optimizations on the crazy large cases.
You’re probably right, these passes probably aren’t actually firing. But, it sounds like we have two options:
- Add cutoffs to poorly understood slow passes that are misbehaving
- Make a core data structure change to make dominance calculations faster and simpler for all transforms
I can do this analysis, and add these cutoffs, but I wouldn’t feel very good about it. It adds code complexity, we’ll have to test it, and tomorrow someone will add new quadratic dominance queries. I don’t see how heuristically limiting misbehaving optimizations builds a better foundation for LLVM tomorrow.
Dominance has been and will always be an important analysis in LLVM. This patch is basically pushing an analysis cache down into IR. Would it be accurate to say that your objection to this approach has more to do with analysis data living in IR data structures?
If I added more infrastructure to invert the dependency, store these instruction numbers in DominatorTree, and make BasicBlock notify DominatorTree of instruction insertion and deletion, would that be preferable? That’s very similar to the code we’re writing today, where the transform takes responsibility for marrying its modifications to its invalidations. The question is, do we want to keep this stuff up to date automatically, like we do for use lists, or is this something we want to maintain on the side? I think dominance is something we might want to start pushing down into IR.
This seems like a good idea. It doesn’t change the fact, however, that local dominance queries are O(n). We’ve ended up using OrderedBasicBlock in an increasing number of places, but there are a number of places where this is hard because of the plumbing required, or more importantly, the ambiguity around who owns the state of the cache at any given time. We know that there are a significant number of additional places where we should be using something like OrderedBasicBlock, but adding OBB into many of these places would be quite non-trivial. As indicated by the performance results briefly described in D51664, we have significant headroom. I don’t see any really feasible way around these issues except moving the ownership of that state into the BB itself. Thanks again, Hal