14 releases
0.5.11 | Oct 15, 2024 |
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0.5.8 | Aug 6, 2024 |
0.5.6 | Apr 9, 2024 |
0.5.5 | Feb 23, 2024 |
0.4.9 | Feb 7, 2024 |
346 downloads per month
Used in 3 crates
48KB
1K
SLoC
smolscale
A global, auto-scaling scheduler for [async-task] using work-balancing.
What? Another executor?
smolscale
is a work-balancing executor based on [async-task], designed to be a drop-in replacement to smol
and async-global-executor
. It is designed based on the idea that work-stealing, the usual approach in async executors like async-executor
and tokio
, is not the right algorithm for scheduling huge amounts of tiny, interdependent work units, which are what message-passing futures end up being. Instead, smolscale
uses work-balancing, an approach also found in Erlang, where a global "balancer" thread periodically balances work between workers, but workers do not attempt to steal tasks from each other. This avoids the extremely frequent stealing attempts that work-stealing schedulers generate when applied to async tasks.
smolscale
's approach especially excels in two circumstances:
- When the CPU cores are not fully loaded: Traditional work stealing optimizes for the case where most workers have work to do, which is only the case in fully-loaded scenarios. When workers often wake up and go back to sleep, however, a lot of CPU time is wasted stealing work.
smolscale
will instead drastically reduce CPU usage in these circumstances --- aasync-executor
app that takes 80% of CPU time may now take only 20%. Although this does not improve fully-loaded throughput, it significantly reduces power consumption and does increase throughput in circumstances where multiple thread pools compete for CPU time. - When a lot of message-passing is happening: Message-passing workloads often involve tasks quickly waking up and going back to sleep. In a work-stealing scheduler, this again floods the scheduler with stealing requests.
smolscale
can significantly improve throughput, especially compared to executors likeasync-executor
that do not special-case message passing.
License: ISC
Dependencies
~12–43MB
~680K SLoC