Sunday, March 04, 2007

It's been a while since i sat down and profiled monotorrent, turns out there's not much that has adversely affected my memory optimisations that i implemented a while ago. Things are all still fine and dandy.

However one thing that i never liked were the large amount of allocations due to using the async sockets. It always annoyed me that the worst part of my code i had no control over. Well, it turns out that it isn't *just* the sockets causing those allocations, there's another thing i haven't looked at yet.

My timer!

I use a single timer in the library which fires about 20 times a second. This was originally needed as a way to make sure that certain events happened regularly. However, I've never liked this timer and i have been working to get rid of it. For example i removed the dependence of downloading pieces and piece picking from that timer (as much as is possible). Download/Upload speed monitoring is still dependant on the timer, so once i remove that dependence and the only other thing left is to make connecting to other peers independent of the timer. Currently i try to connect to a new peer every timer tick so long as i haven't reached the limit.

So, before i used to have an allocation graph that looks like this:


That big yellow bar is the allocations due to both the timer and the async sockets. There's a lot of execution contexts there :p After changing the timer interval to 1 second, i get the following allocation graph:


That tiny cyan coloured bar is the severely reduced amount of execution contexts being allocated. So before you all get to feel the benefits of that change, i have to modify a fair bit of code. Once thats done, i'll be releasing beta 3 which is (hopefully) a lot more stable than any previous version, and faster, and uses less ram, and uses less CPU and god knows what else ;)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nicely Done! I've been profiling a lot of code this weekend as well, and it's always nice to make a find like that.

Unknown said...

Nice stuff, Alan!
That reminds me, It's another skill i have to pick up - Profiling, I rarely do that. Do you use whatever comes with VS or other tools?

planetbeing said...

I'm using Beta 2 of your MonoTorrent client as part of a little gadget I'm writing to search on the web for specific files within torrents and download them.

Before I start the torrent, I set the priority for all the files except the one I'm interested to do not download. Does this work as expected? Because all of the other files are pre-allocated as well. While this is acceptable, it is kind of annoying. Would an easy fix be possible? (not pre-allocating?)

A little bit more urgent for me is that my school, while allowing peer-to-peer filesharing on paper, has largely blocked non-encrypted BitTorrent (I get a few kilobytes here and there). Thus, adding in encryption would be really, really useful. =)

I know you have limited time, so I might see about making these changes myself. Encryption might take a lot of work, though. I have no experience with the inner workings of the bittorrent protocol, so it will be difficult to tell if I'm doing the right thing. (although the document at http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Message_Stream_Encryption for the encryption part looks clear enough)

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