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Fix CoW in HTTPResponseAggregator (#345)
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Motivation:

HTTPResponseAggregator attempts to build a single, complete response
object. This necessarily means it loads the entire response payload into
memory. It wants to provide this payload as a single contiguous buffer
of data, and it does so by aggregating the data into a single contiguous
buffer as it goes.

Because ByteBuffer does exponential reallocation, the cost of doing this
should be amortised constant-time, even though we do have to copy some
data sometimes. However, if this operation triggers a copy-on-write then
the operation will become quadratic. For large buffers this will rapidly
come to dominate the runtime.

Unfortunately in at least Swift 5.3 Swift cannot safely see that during
the body stanza the state variable is dead. Swift is not necessarily
wrong about this: there's a cross-module call to ByteBuffer.writeBuffer
in place and Swift cannot easily prove that that call will not lead to a
re-entrant access of the `HTTPResponseAggregator` object. For this
reason, during the call to `didReceiveBodyPart` there will be two copies
of the body buffer alive, and so the write will CoW.

This quadratic behaviour is a nasty performance trap that can become
highly apparent even at quite small body sizes.

Modifications:

While Swift can't prove that the `self.state` variable is dead, we can!
To that end, we temporarily set it to a different value that does not
store the buffer in question. This will force Swift to drop the ref on
the buffer, making it uniquely owned and avoiding the CoW.

Sadly, it's extremely difficult to test for "does not CoW", so this
patch does not currently come with any tests. I have experimentally
verified the behaviour.

Result:

No copy-on-write in the HTTPResponseAggregator during body aggregation.
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Lukasa authored Mar 8, 2021
1 parent 5d9b784 commit 0dda95c
Showing 1 changed file with 5 additions and 0 deletions.
5 changes: 5 additions & 0 deletions Sources/AsyncHTTPClient/HTTPHandler.swift
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -380,6 +380,11 @@ public class ResponseAccumulator: HTTPClientResponseDelegate {
case .head(let head):
self.state = .body(head, part)
case .body(let head, var body):
// The compiler can't prove that `self.state` is dead here (and it kinda isn't, there's
// a cross-module call in the way) so we need to drop the original reference to `body` in
// `self.state` or we'll get a CoW. To fix that we temporarily set the state to `.end` (which
// has no associated data). We'll fix it at the bottom of this block.
self.state = .end
var part = part
body.writeBuffer(&part)
self.state = .body(head, body)
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