So what's wrong with 1975 programming?

Интересное эссе от архитектора Varnish ("Varnish is a state-of-the-art, high-performance HTTP accelerator").

Наиболее интересные куски (всё же рекомендую прочесть целиком):

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Take Squid for instance, a 1975 program if I ever saw one: You tell it how much RAM it can use and how much disk it can use. It will then spend inordinate amounts of time keeping track of what HTTP objects are in RAM and which are on disk and it will move them forth and back depending on traffic patterns.

Well, today computers really only have one kind of storage, and it is usually some sort of disk, the operating system and the virtual memory management hardware has converted the RAM to a cache for the disk storage.

So what happens with squids elaborate memory management is that it gets into fights with the kernels elaborate memory management, and like any civil war, that never gets anything done.

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Here is how Varnish does it:

Varnish allocate some virtual memory, it tells the operating system to back this memory with space from a disk file. When it needs to send the object to a client, it simply refers to that piece of virtual memory and leaves the rest to the kernel.

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And that's it. Varnish doesn't really try to control what is cached in RAM and what is not, the kernel has code and hardware support to do a good job at that, and it does a good job.

Varnish also only has a single file on the disk whereas squid puts one object in its own separate file. The HTTP objects are not needed as filesystem objects, so there is no point in wasting time in the filesystem name space (directories, filenames and all that) for each object, all we need to have in Varnish is a pointer into virtual memory and a length, the kernel does the rest.

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We also try to reuse memory which is likely to be in the caches.

The worker threads are used in "most recently busy" fashion, when a workerthread becomes free it goes to the front of the queue where it is most likely to get the next request, so that all the memory it already has cached, stack space, variables etc, can be reused while in the cache, instead of having the expensive fetches from RAM.

We also give each worker thread a private set of variables it is likely to need, all allocated on the stack of the thread. That way we are certain that they occupy a page in RAM which none of the other CPUs will ever think about touching as long as this thread runs on its own CPU. That way they will not fight about the cachelines.

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— Poul-Henning Kamp, Notes from the Architect.