| ▲ | Why pipes sometimes get "stuck": buffering(jvns.ca) |
| 295 points by tanelpoder 10 hours ago | 70 comments |
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| ▲ | Veserv 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The solution is that buffered accesses should almost always flush after a threshold number of bytes or after a period of time if there is at least one byte, “threshold or timeout”. This is pretty common in hardware interfaces to solve similar problems. In this case, the library that buffers in userspace should set appropriate timers when it first buffers the data. Good choices of timeout parameter are: passed in as argument, slightly below human-scale (e.g. 1-100 ms), proportional to {bandwidth / threshold} (i.e. some multiple of the time it would take to reach the threshold at a certain access rate), proportional to target flushing overhead (e.g. spend no more than 0.1% time in syscalls). Also note this applies for both writes and reads. If you do batched/coalesced reads then you likely want to do something similar. Though this is usually more dependent on your data channel as you need some way to query or be notified of “pending data” efficiently which your channel may not have if it was not designed for this use case. Again, pretty common in hardware to do interrupt coalescing and the like. |
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| ▲ | YZF 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I would tend to disagree. The buffering here is doing what's it's supposed to be. The mix of something that's supposed to be interactive with a contract that's not meant to be interactive is the source of the problem (tail following into a pipe). There's no real problem to solve here. The "hardware" analog is a tank of water that accumulates rainwater and you only move it somewhere when it fills up. I'm not sure what examples you have in mind but time based flushes aren't common in hardware AFAIK. The proposed fix makes the contract a lot more complicated. | |
| ▲ | toast0 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think this is the right approach, but any libc setting automatic timers would lead to a lot of tricky problems because it would change expectations. I/O errors could occur at any point, instead of only when you write. Syscalls everywhere could be interrupted by a timer, instead of only where the program set timers, or when a signal arrives. There's also a reasonable chance of confusion when the application and libc both set timer, depending on how the timer is set (although maybe this isn't relevant anymore... kernel timer apis look better than I remember). If the application specifically pauses signals for critical sections, that impacts the i/o timers, etc. There's a need to be more careful in accessing i/o structures because of when and how signals get handled. | | |
| ▲ | Veserv 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You will generally only stall indefinitely if you are waiting for new data. So, you will actually handle almost every use case if your blocking read/wait also respects the timeout and does the flush on your behalf. Basically, do it synchronously at the top of your event loop and you will handle almost every case. You could also relax the guarantee and set a timeout that is only checked during your next write. This still allows unbounded latency, but as long as you do one more write it will flush. If neither of these work, then your program issues a write and then gets into a unbounded or unreasonably long loop/computation. At which point you can manually flush what is likely the last write your program is every going to make which would be a trivial overhead since that is a single write compared to a ridiculously long computation. That or you probably have bigger problems. | | |
| ▲ | toast0 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, these are all fine to do, but a libc can really only do the middle one. And then, at some cost. If you're already using an event loop library, I think it's reasonable for that to manage flushing outputs while waiting for reads, but I don't think any of the utilities in this example do; maybe tcpdump does, but I don't know why grep would. |
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| ▲ | nine_k 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don't follow. Using a pipe sets an expectation of some amount of asynchronicity, because we only control one end of the pipe. I don't see a dramatic difference between an error occurring because of the process on the other end is having trouble, or because of a timeout handler is trying to push the bytes. On the reading end, the error may occur at the attempt to read the pipe. On the writing end, the error may be signaled at the next attempt to write to or close the pipe. In either case, a SIGPIPE can be sent asynchronously. What scenario am I missing? | | |
| ▲ | toast0 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > In either case, a SIGPIPE can be sent asynchronously. My expectation (and I think this is an accurate expecation) is that a) read does not cause a SIGPIPE, read on a widowed pipe returns a zero count read as indication of EOF. b) write on a widowed pipe raises SIGPIPE before the write returns. c) write to a pipe that is valid will not raise SIGPIPE if the pipe is widowed without being read from. Yes, you could get a SIGPIPE from anywhere at anytime, but unless someone is having fun on your system with random kills, you won't actually get one except immediately after a write to a pipe. With a timer based asynchronous write, this changes to potentially happening any time. This could be fine if it was well documented and expected, but it would be a mess to add it into the libcs at this point. Probably a mess to add it to basic output buffering in most languages. |
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| ▲ | vlovich123 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Typical Linux alarms are based on signals and are very difficult to manage and rescheduling them may have a performance impact since it requires thunking into the kernel. If you use io_uring with userspace timers things can scale much better, but it still requires you to do tricks if you want to support a lot of fast small writes (eg > ~1 million writes per second timer management starts to show up more and more and you have to do some crazy tricks I figured out to get up to 100M writes per second) | | |
| ▲ | Veserv 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | You do not schedule a timeout on each buffered write. You only schedule one timeout on the transition from empty to non-empty that is retired either when the timeout occurs or when you threshold flush (you may choose to not clear on threshold flush if timeout management is expensive). So, you program at most one timeout per timeout duration/threshold flush. The point is to guarantee data gets flushed promptly which only fails when not enough data gets buffered. The timeout is a fallback to bound the flush latency. | | |
| ▲ | vlovich123 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes that can work but as I said that has trade offs. If you flush before the buffer is full, you’re sacrificing throughput. Additionally the timer firing has additional performance degradation especially if you’re in libc land and only have a sigalarm available. So when an additional write is added, you want to push out the timer. But arming the timer requires reading the current time among other things and at rates of 10-20Mhz and up reading the current wall clock gets expensive. Even rdtsc approaches start to struggle at 20-40Mhz. You obviously don’t want to do it on every write but you want to make sure that you never actually trigger the timer if you’re producing data at a relatively fast enough clip to otherwise fill the buffer within a reasonable time. Source: I implemented write coalescing in my nosql database that can operate at a few gigahertz for 8 byte writes/s into an in memory buffer. Once the buffer is full or a timeout occurs, a flush to disk is triggered and I net out at around 100M writes/s (sorting the data for the LSM is one of the main bottlenecks). By comparison DBs like RocksDB can do ~2M writes/s and SQLite can do ~800k. | | |
| ▲ | Veserv 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | You are not meaningfully sacrificing throughput because the timeout only occurs when you are not writing enough data; you have no throughput to sacrifice. The threshold and timeout should be chosen such that high throughput cases hit the threshold, not the timeout. The timeout exists to bound the worst-case latency of low access throughput. You only lose throughput in proportion to the handling cost of a single potentially spurious timeout/timeout clear per timeout duration. You should then tune your buffering and threshold to cap that at a acceptable overhead. You should only really have a problem if you want both high throughput and low latency at which point general solutions are probably not not fit for your use case, but you should remain aware of the general principle. | | |
| ▲ | vlovich123 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > You should only really have a problem if you want both high throughput and low latency at which point general solutions are probably not not fit for your use case, but you should remain aware of the general principle. Yes you’ve accurately summarized the end goal. Generally people want high throughput AND low latency, not to just cap the maximum latency. The one shot timer approach only solves a livelock risk. I’ll also note that your throughput does actually drop at the same time as the latency spike because your buffer stays the same size but you took longer to flush to disk. Tuning correctly turns out to be really difficult to accomplish in practice which is why you really want self healing/self adapting systems that behave consistently across all hardware and environments. |
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| ▲ | asveikau 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think doing those timeouts transparently would be tricky under the constraints of POSIX and ISO C. It would need to have some cooperation from the application layer | | |
| ▲ | jart 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | The only way you'd be able to do it is by having functions like fputc() call clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC_COARSE) which will impose ~3ns overhead on platforms like x86-64 Linux which have a vDSO implementation. So it can be practical sort of although it'd probably be smarter to just use line buffered or unbuffered stdio. In practice even unbuffered i/o isn't that bad. It's the default for stderr. It actually is buffered in practice, since even in unbuffered mode, functions like printf() still buffer internally. You just get assurances whatever it prints will be flushed by the end of the call. | | |
| ▲ | asveikau 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's just for checking the clock. You'd also need to have a way of getting called back when the timeout expires, after fputc et al are long gone from the stack and your program is busy somewhere else, or maybe blocked. Timeouts are usually done with signals (a safety nightmare, so no thanks) or an event loop. Hence my thought that you can't do it really transparently while keeping current interfaces. | | |
| ▲ | jart 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Signals aren't a nightmare it's just that fflush() isn't defined by POSIX as being asynchronous signal safe. You could change all your stdio functions to block signals while running, but then you'd be adding like two system calls to every fputc() call. Smart thing to do would probably be creating a thread with a for (;;) { usleep(10000); fflush(stdout); } loop. | | |
| ▲ | asveikau 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Signals are indeed a nightmare. Your example of adding tons of syscalls to make up for lack of safety shows that you understand that to be true. And no, creating threads to solve this fringe problem in a spin loop with a sleep is not what I'd call "smart". It's unnecessary complexity and in most cases, totally wasted work. | | |
| ▲ | jart 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The smartest thing to do is still probably not buffering. What's wrong with the thread? It would take maybe 15 lines of code to implement. It would be correct without rarely occurring bugs. It doesn't need signals or timers. It wouldn't add overhead to stdio calls. It's a generalized abstraction. You won't need to change your program's event loop code. Create the thread with a tiny 64kb stack and what's not to like? Granted, it would rub me the wrong way if libc did this by default, since I wouldn't want mystery threads appearing in htop for my hello world programs. But for an app developer, this is a sure fire solution. |
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| ▲ | londons_explore 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'd like all buffers to be flushed whenever the systemwide CPU becomes idle. Buffering generally is a CPU-saving technique. If we had infinite CPU, all buffers would be 1 byte. Buffers are a way of collecting together data to process in a batch for efficiency. However, when the CPU becomes idle, we shouldn't have any work "waiting to be done". As soon as the kernel scheduler becomes idle, all processes should be sent a "flush your buffers" signal. |
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| ▲ | webstrand 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | That's a neat idea, probably not all at once though. And it could reduce efficiency for low power systems to be speculatively waking sleeping processes? |
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| ▲ | hiatus 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Some things I didn’t talk about in this post since these posts have been getting pretty long recently and seriously does anyone REALLY want to read 3000 words about buffering? I personally would. |
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| ▲ | CoastalCoder 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | It depends on the writing. I've read that sometimes wordy articles are mostly fluff for SEO. | | |
| ▲ | TeMPOraL 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | In case of this particular author, those 3000 words would be dense, unbuffered wisdom. | |
| ▲ | penguin_booze 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Summarizing is one area where I'd consider using AI. I haven't explored what solutions exist yet. |
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| ▲ | Twirrim 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is one of those things where, despite some 20+ years of dealing with NIX systems, I know* it happens, but always forget about it until I've sat puzzled why I've got no output for several moments. |
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| ▲ | wyuenho an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| An equally important but opposite problem with pipes getting stuck is pipes getting broken because some commands at the front of the pipe expects buffering down the pipe. Some years ago I was scratching my head trying to figure out why curl ... | grep -q
was giving me a "Failed write body error". I knew "grep -q" would close stdin and exit as soon as a match is found, and therefore I needed a buffer in front of grep but I was on a Mac, which to this day still doesn't come with "sponge" (or stdbuf and unbuffer for that matter), so I had to find a cross-platform command that does a little buffering but not too much, and could handle stdout being closed. So I settled on: curl ... | uniq | grep -q
To this day people are still confused why there's not a "sort" in front of uniq and the comment about this cross-platform buffer thing I put in the script. |
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| ▲ | calibas 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Buffers are there for good reason, it's extremely slow (relatively speaking) to print output on a screen compared to just writing it to a buffer. Printing something character-by-character is incredibly inefficient. This is an old problem, I encounter it often when working with UART, and there's a variety of possible solutions: Use a special character, like a new line, to signal the end of output (line-based). Use a length-based approach, such as waiting for 8KB of data. Use a time-based approach, and print the output every X milliseconds. Each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses, depends upon the application which one works best. I believe the article is incorrect when mentioning certain programs that don't use buffering, they just don't use an obvious length-based approach. |
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| ▲ | qazxcvbnmlp 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Having a layer or two above the interface aware of the constraint works the best (when possible). Line based approach does this but requires agreement on the character (new line). | | | |
| ▲ | PhilipRoman 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Also, it's not just the work needed to actually handle the write on the backend - even just making that many syscalls to /dev/null can kill your performance. |
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| ▲ | o11c 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This article is confusing two different things: "unbuffered" vs "line-buffered". Unbuffered will gratuitously give you worse performance, and can create incorrect output if multiple sources are writing to the same pipe. (sufficiently-long lines will intermingle anyway, but most real-world output lines are less than 4096 bytes, even including formatting/control characters and characters from supplementary planes) Line-buffering is the default for terminals, and usually what you want for pipes. Run each command under `stdbuf -oL -eL` to get this. The rare programs that want to do in-line updates already have to do manual flushing so will work correctly here too. You can see what `stdbuf` is actually doing by running: env -i `command -v stdbuf` -oL -eL `command -v env`
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| ▲ | toast0 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > when you press Ctrl-C on a pipe, the contents of the buffer are lost I think most programs will flush their buffers on SIGINT... But for that to work from a shell, you'd need to deliver SIGINT to only the first program in the pipeline, and I guess that's not how that works. |
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| ▲ | akdev1l 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | The last process gets sigint and everything else gets sigpipe iirc | | |
| ▲ | tolciho 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No, INTR "generates a SIGINT signal which is sent to all processes in the foreground process group for which the terminal is the controlling terminal" (termios(4) on OpenBSD, other what passes for unix these days are similar), as complicated by what exactly is in the foreground process group (use tcgetpgrp(3) to determine that) and what signal masking or handlers those processes have (which can vary over the lifetime of a process, especially for a shell that does job control), or whether some process has disabled ISIG—the terminal being shared "global" state between one or more processes—in which case none of the prior may apply. $ make pa re ci
cc -O2 -pipe -o pa pa.c
cc -O2 -pipe -o re re.c
cc -O2 -pipe -o ci ci.c
$ ./pa | ./re | ./ci > /dev/null
^Cci (2) 66241 55611 55611
pa (2) 55611 55611 55611
re (2) 63366 55611 55611
So with "pa" program that prints "y" to stdout, and "re" and "ci" that are basically cat(1) except that these programs all print some diagnostic information and then exit when a SIGPIPE or SIGINT is received, here showing that (on OpenBSD, with ksh, at least) a SIGINT is sent to each process in the foreground process group (55611, also being logged is the getpgrp which is also 55611). $ kill -l | grep INT
2 INT Interrupt 18 TSTP Suspended
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| ▲ | toast0 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That makes sense to me, but the article implied everything got a sigint, but the last program got it first. Eitherway, you'd need a different way to ask the shell to do it the otherway... Otoh, do programs routinely flush if they get SIGINFO? dd(1) on FreeBSD will output progress if you hit it with SIGINFO and continue it's work, which you can trigger with ctrl+T if you haven't set it differently. But that probably goes to the foreground process, so probably doesn't help. And, there's the whole thing where SIGINFO isn't POSIX and isn't really in Linux, so it's hard to use there... This article [1] says tcpdump will output the packet counts, so it might also flush buffers, I'll try to check and report a little later today. [1] https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/SIG... | | |
| ▲ | toast0 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > This article [1] says tcpdump will output the packet counts, so it might also flush buffers, I'll try to check and report a little later today. I checked, tcpdump doesn't seem to flush stdout on siginfo, and hitting ctrl+T doesn't deliver it a siginfo in the tcpdump | grep case anyway. Killing tcpdump with sigint does work: tcpdump's output is flushed and it closes, and then the grep finishes too, but there's not a button to hit for that. |
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| ▲ | ctoth 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Feels like a missed opportunity for a frozen pipes joke. Then again... Frozen pipes are no joke. |
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| ▲ | mg 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Related: Why pipes can be indeterministic. https://www.gibney.org/the_output_of_linux_pipes_can_be_inde... |
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| ▲ | Thaxll 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| TTY, console, shell, stdin/out, buffer, pipe, I wish there was a clear explanation somewhere of how all of those are glue/work together. |
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| ▲ | NelsonMinar 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I've been doing Unix for 35+ years and have never fully understood how this works. I appreciate the holistic description here, talking about buffering behaviors across a bunch of different systems and components. I definitely learned something from it. |
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| ▲ | josephcsible 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I've ran into this before, and I've always wondered why programs don't just do this: when data gets added to a previously-empty output buffer, make the input non-blocking, and whenever a read comes back with EWOULDBLOCK, flush the output buffer and make the input blocking again. (Or in other words, always make sure the output buffer is flushed before waiting/going to sleep.) Wouldn't this fix the problem? Would it have any negative side effects? |
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| ▲ | frogulis 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Hopefully not a silly question: in the original example, even if we had enough log data coming from `tail` to fill up the first `grep` buffer, if the logfile ever stopped being updated, then there would likely be "stragglers" left in the `grep` buffer that were never outputted, right? |
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| ▲ | chrsw 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I've run into this buffering issue on Unix before and it had me scratching my head for a while. Caution: not all 'awk' implementations behave the same with respect to buffering. |
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| ▲ | m00x 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Because it's not a truck that you can just dump things on, it's a series of tubes. |
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| ▲ | why-el 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Love it. > this post is only about buffering that happens inside the program, your operating system’s TTY driver also does a little bit of buffering sometimes and if the TTY is remote, so do the network switches! it's buffering all the way down. |
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| ▲ | Joker_vD 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I think this problem is probably unavoidable – I spent a little time with strace to see how this works and grep receives the SIGINT before tcpdump anyway so even if tcpdump tried to flush its buffer grep would already be dead. I believe quite a few utilities actually do try to flush their stdout on receiving SIGINT... but as you've said, the other side of the pipe may also very well have received a SIGINT, and nobody does a short-timed wait on stdin on SIGINT: after all, the whole reason you've been sent SIGINT is because the user wants your program to stop working now. |
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| ▲ | jakub_g 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| In our CI we used to have some ruby commands that were piped to prepend "HH:MM:SS" to each line to track progress (because GitLab still doesn't support this out of the box, though it's supposed to land in 17.0), but it would sometimes lead to some logs being flushed with a large delay. I knew it had something to do with buffers and it drove me nuts, but couldn't find a fix, all solutions tried didn't really work. (Problem got solved when we got rid of ruby in CI - it was legacy). |
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| ▲ | Rygian 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Learned two things: `unbuffer` exists, and “unnecessary” cats are just fine :-) |
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| ▲ | wrsh07 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I like unnecessary cat because it makes the rest of the pipe reusable across other commands Eg if I want to test out my greps on a static file and then switch to grepping based on a tail -f command | | |
| ▲ | chatmasta 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yep. I use unnecessary cats when I’m using the shell interactively, and especially when I’m building up some complex pipeline of commands by figuring out how to do each step before moving onto the next. Once I have the final command, if I’m moving it into a shell script, then _maybe_ I’ll switch to file redirection. |
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| ▲ | two_handfuls 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Maybe that's why my mbp sometimes appears not to see my keyboard input for a whole second even though nothing much is running. |
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| ▲ | BeefWellington 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| AFAIK, signal order generally propagates backwards, so the last command run will always receive the signal first, provided it is a foreground command. But also, the example is not a great one; grepping tcpdump output doesn't make sense given its extensive and well-documented expression syntax. It's obviously just used as an example here to demonstrate buffering. |
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| ▲ | Joker_vD 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > grepping tcpdump output doesn't make sense given its extensive and well-documented expression syntax Well. Personally, every time I've tried to learn its expression syntax from its extensive documentation my eyes would start to glaze over after about 60 seconds; so I just stick with grep — at worst, I have to put the forgotten "-E" in front of the pattern and re-run the command. By the way, and slightly off-tangent: if anyone ever wanted grep to output only some part of the captured pattern, like -o but only for the part inside the parentheses, then one way to do it is to use a wrapper like this: #!/bin/sh -e
GREP_PATTERN="$1"
SED_PATTERN="$(printf '%s\n' "$GREP_PATTERN" | sed 's;/;\\/;g')"
shift
grep -E "$GREP_PATTERN" --line-buffered "$@" | sed -r 's/^.*'"$SED_PATTERN"'.*$/\1/g'
Not the most efficient way, I imagine, but it works fine for my use cases (in which I never need more than one capturing group anyway). Example invocation: $ xgrep '(^[^:]+):.*:/nonexistent:' /etc/passwd
nobody
messagebus
_apt
tcpdump
whoopsie
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| ▲ | chatmasta 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | ChatGPT has eliminated this class of problem for me. In fact it’s pretty much all I use it for. Whether it’s ffmpeg, tcpdump, imagemagick, SSH tunnels, Pandas, numpy, or some other esoteric program with its own DSL… ChatGPT can construct the arguments I need. And if it gets it wrong, it’s usually one prompt away from fixing it. |
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| ▲ | toast0 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > grepping tcpdump output doesn't make sense given its extensive and well-documented expression syntax. I dunno. If doesn't make sense in the world where everyone makes the most efficient pipelines for what they want; but in that world, they also always remember to use --line-buffered on grep when needed, and the line buffered output option for tcpdump. In reality, for a short term thing, grepping on the grepable parts of the output can be easier than reviewing the docs to get the right filter to do what you really want. Ex, if you're dumping http requests and you want to see only lines that match some url, you can use grep. Might not catch everything, but usually I don't need to see everything. |
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| ▲ | mpbart 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Wow I had no idea this behavior existed. Now I’m wondering how much time I’ve wasted trying to figure out why my pipelined greps don’t show correct output |
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| ▲ | radarsat1 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Side note maybe, but is there an alternative to chaining two greps? |
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| ▲ | ykonstant 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | The most portable way to do it with minimal overhead is with sed: sed -e '/pattern1/!d' -e '/pattern2/!d'
which generalizes to more terms. Easier to remember and just as portable is awk '/pattern1/ && /pattern2/'
but now you need to launch a full awk.For more ways see https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/55359/how-to-run-gr... | | |
| ▲ | jrpelkonen an hour ago | parent [-] | | These are good suggestions, but maybe it’s worth noting that one of the solutions offered in the article is not equivalent: tail -f /some/log/file | grep -E 'thing1.*thing2'
This will only match if the subpatterns, i.e. thing1 & thing2, are in this order, and also require that the patterns do not overlap. |
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| ▲ | SG- 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| how important is buffering in 2024 on modern ultra fast single user systems I wonder? I'd be interested in seeing it disabled for testing purposes. |
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| ▲ | akira2501 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > on modern ultra fast single user systems I wonder? The latency of a 'syscall' is on the order of a few hundred instructions. You're switching to a different privilege mode, with a different memory map, and where your data ultimately has to leave the chip to reach hardware. It's absurdly important and it will never not be. | |
| ▲ | chatmasta 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It depends what the consumer is doing with the data as it exits the buffer. If it’s a terminal program printing every character, then it’s going to be slow. Or more generally if it’s any program that doesn’t have its own buffering, then it will become the bottleneck so the slowdown will depend on how it processes input. Ultimately even “no buffer” still has a buffer, which is the number of bits it reads at a time. Maybe that’s 1, or 64, but it still needs some boundary between iterations. |
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| ▲ | kreetx 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| From experience, `unbuffer` is the tool to use to turn buffering off reliably. |
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| ▲ | BoingBoomTschak 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Also made a post some time ago about the issue: https://world-playground-deceit.net/blog/2024/09/bourne_shel... About the commands that don't buffer, this is either implementation dependent or even wrong in the case of cat (cf https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/c... and `-u`). Massive pain that POSIX never included an official way to manage this. Not mentioned is input buffering, that would gives you this strange result: $ seq 5 | { v1=$(head -1); v2=$(head -1); printf '%s=%s\n' v1 "$v1" v2 "$v2"; }
v1=1
v2=
The fix is to use `stdbuf -i0 head -1`, in this case. |
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| ▲ | jagrsw 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't believe a process reading from a pipe/socketpair/whatever can enforce such constraints on a writing process (except using heavy hackery like ptrace()). While it might be possible to adjust the pipe buffer size, I'm not aware of any convention requiring standard C I/O to respect this. In any case, stdbuf doesn't seem to help with this: $ ./a | stdbuf -i0 -- cat
#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int main(void) {
for (;;) {
printf("n");
usleep(100000);
}
}
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| ▲ | BoingBoomTschak 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you're meaning. The issue in your example is the output buffering of a, not the input buffering of cat. You'd need `stdbuf -o0 ./a | cat` there. |
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| ▲ | pixelbeat 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Nice article. See also:
https://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/stdio_buffering/ It's also worth mentioning a recent improvement we made (in coreutils 8.28) to the operation of the `tail | grep` example in the article. tail now notices if the pipe goes away, so one could wait for something to appear in a log, like: tail -f /log/file | grep -q match
then_do_something
There are lots of gotchas to pipe handling really.
See also: https://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/sigpipe_handling.html |
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| ▲ | emcell 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| one of the reasons why i hate computers :D |
