a problem with pthread_once on an out-dated solaris installation.

when adding a thread-specific allocator to a program of mine, to avoid terrible performance loss while using gmp and/or mpfr to do arbitrary precision integer respectively floating point arithmetic, i stumbled about a problem which seems to be fixed with newer solaris versions. in case anyone experiences a similar problem and cannot just update to a new enough solaris version, here’s some information on a dirty’n'quick fix for the problem.
more precisely, i wanted to combine boost::thread_specific_pointer (a portable implementation of thread specific storage, with dlmalloc, to obtain an allocator which won’t block when used from different threads at once. if you use arbitrary precision arithmetic on a machine with many cores/cpus (say, 30 to 60), having a single blocking (via a mutex) allocator totally kills performance. for example, on our ultrasparc/solaris machine, running 29 threads (on 30 cpus) in parallel, only 20% of the system’s ressources were used effectively. if the machine would have only had 6 cpus, the program would have run at the same speed. quite a waste, isn’t it?
anyway, combining thread local storage and a memory allocator solves this problem. in theory, at least. when i put the two things together, and ran my program with 30 threads, stlil only 60% of the 30 cpus processing power was used – the other 40% of the cycles were still spend waiting. (solaris has some excellent profiling tools on board. that’s why i like to use our slow old outdated solaris machine to profile, instead of our blazing fast newer big linux machine. in case anyone cares.) interestingly, on our linux machine, with 64 threads (running on 64 cores), the problem wasn’t there: 100% of the cycles went into computing, and essentially none into waiting.
inspecting the problem closer with the sun studio analyzer, it turns out that the 40% waiting cycles are caused by pthread_once, which is called by the internal boost method boost::detail::find_tss_data. that method is called every time a boost::thread_specific_pointer<> is dereferenced. which in my program happens every time when the thread local allocator is fired up to allocate, reallocate or free a piece of memory. (more precisely, boost::detail::find_tss_data calls boost::detail::get_current_thread_data, which uses boost::call_once, which in turn uses pthread_once in the pthread implementation of boost::thread, which is the implementation used on unixoid systems, such as solaris and linux.)
in theory, pthread_once uses a double-checked locking mechanism to make sure that the function specified is ran exactly once during the execution of the wohle program. while searching online, i found the source of the pthread implementation of a newer opensolaris from 2008 here; it uses a double-checked locking with a memory barrier, which should (at least in theory) turn it into a working solution (multi-threaded programming is far from being simple, both the compiler and the cpu can screw up your code by rearranging instructions in a deadly way).
anyway, it seems that the pthread_once implementation on the soliaris installation on the machine i’m using just locks a mutex every time it is called. when you massively call the function from 30 threads at once, all running perfectly parallel on a machine with enough cpus, this gives a natural bottle-neck. to make sure it is pthread_once which causes the problem, i wrote the following test program:

 1#include <pthread.h>
 2#include <iostream>
 3
 4static pthread_once_t onceControl = PTHREAD_ONCE_INIT;
 5static int nocalls = 0;
 6
 7extern "C" void onceRoutine(void)
 8{
 9    std::cout << "onceRoutine()\n";
10    nocalls++;
11}
12
13extern "C" void * thethread(void * x)
14{
15    for (unsigned i = 0; i < 10000000; ++i)
16        pthread_once(&onceControl, onceRoutine);
17    return NULL;
18}
19
20int main()
21{
22    const int nothreads = 30;
23    pthread_t threads[nothreads];
24
25    for (int i=0; i < nothreads; ++i)
26        pthread_create(&threads[i], NULL, thethread, NULL);
27
28    for (int i=0; i < nothreads; ++i)
29    {
30        void * status;
31        pthread_join(threads[i], &status);
32    }
33
34    if (nocalls != 1)
35        std::cout << "pthread_once() screwed up totally!\n";
36    else
37        std::cout << "pthread_once() seems to be doing what it promises\n";
38    return 0;
39}

1real    16m9.541s
2user    201m1.476s
3sys     0m18.499s

1real    0m0.243s
2user    0m1.640s
3sys     0m0.060s

1#include <atomic.h>
2#include <thread.h>
3#include <errno.h>

1real    0m0.928s
2user    0m20.181s
3sys     0m0.036s