The fastest Linux timestamps

If you do this, please be aware that there is absolutely no guarantee that you will not observe time going backwards. You probably will not have one thread ask for the time twice in a row and get results that are out of order, but you can have thread 1 ask for the time and do a store-release and then have thread 2 do a load-acquire, observe thread 1’s write, and ask for the time, and thread 2’s time may be earlier than thread 1’s. This is because RDTSC by itself does not respect x86’s memory order — it does not act like a load.

source: I wrote a bunch of this code and I’ve tested it fairly extensively.

	▲	vlovich123 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Do you know if the rust quanta / fastant crates have this problem? I feel like they don’t but I haven’t actually dug into the implementation. The reason I think not is that at least in the case of quanta the clock value can be made to be broadcast from a single clock maintainer thread. But even when its using plain rdtsc it says it upholds monotonicity barring kernel/virtualization bugs: https://docs.rs/quanta/latest/quanta/struct.Instant.html So I think it’s possible to do this correctly?

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Veserv 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can still do better by not doing any TSC to nanosecond conversion. Instead, you inject clock adjustments into your log stream allowing you to convert when you decode the logs rather than when you generate the logs.

Using the final version, you would just make the cache refresh() function emit the clock adjustment log entry instead of actually caching anything. Then, any later log entry TSC would implicitly be relative to that clock adjustment log entry when you decode the log. Worst case you would need to persist every clock adjustment entry even when sampling, but that would still only be on the order of a few KB/s at worst and you could still drop entrys with no non-clock adjustment entrys between them.

	▲	hmpc 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yep, I should probably have mentioned this option for completeness. In practice, however, it only saves you a few cycles/nanos and adds more complexity and failure points downstream.

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rockwotj 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Related reading is absl’s linear approximation of gettime from cycle counters, which I thought is a neat trick: https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/blob/351086314d46e73d43...

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RossBencina 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Great read. A question: what is the status of this problem on other architectures such as ARM and RISC-V, would the analysis and solution be the same? e.g. does ARM have invariant TSC?

	▲	hogehoge51 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		riscv has mtime. it is somewhat implementation defined, but it should be a single hardware timer shared by all harts. The Zicntr extension defines user space rdtime psuedo instruction to acesss it from userspace. aarch64 has cntvct_el0 status register that can be read from userspace.

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jeffbee 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I can beat this by not trying to wrap a trace span around something that only takes 100ns.

If the thing of interest just runs on the CPU briefly, tracing is not what you want. You want a profiler that only runs when you're looking at it. Distributed tracing is for things that can go wrong and take uncertain amounts of time.

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hmpc 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You might've misunderstood the requirements. The time scale was 1-10 micros per component; 100 ns was the overhead per span we were aiming for.

In this case distributed tracing absolutely was the right choice. These were not simple computational tasks. The components were highly stateful and interconnected both on- and cross-host. Between this and the timescale, as well as the volume of events and the dollar-value impact of each potential failure (of which there were many), we needed real-time analysis capabilities, not a profiler.

	▲	jeffbee 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I guess my skepticism about the application colored my reading of the rest of it. If it had only said you needed it to be faster, that would have been easier for a simpleton like me.