[Bug 1988240] Re: Performance regression with memcpy on Intel CPU

[Shantanu Jain]

Thanks for the quick response!

> Would you be able to double-check whether that patch is responsible?
I'll figure out how to build glibc to confirm that it's related to 1928508 and get back to you with definitive confirmation :-)

> Have you seen different performance behavior in recent glibc versions?
Yes, like I mentioned, libc6-dev==2.31-0ubuntu9.7 has >3x better performance than libc6-dev==2.31-
0ubuntu9.7.
(I see even better performance on the same hardware with 18.04 using a much older glibc)

> or other distros with the same glibc version.
Not yet, I can try this as well.

> One could also use different tunable values
Thanks for the suggestion! I can confirm that setting `export GLIBC_TUNABLES=glibc.cpu.x86_non_temporal_threshold=$(( 1024*1024*3*4 ))` fixes the performance regression. This also points to 1928508

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1988240

Title:
  Performance regression with memcpy on Intel CPU

Status in glibc package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  # lsb_release -rd
  Description:	Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS
  Release:	20.04

  Reporting a performance regression in libc6-dev==2.31-0ubuntu9.9 when
  upgrading from 9.7.

  Regression was observed on Intel Xeon(R) Gold 6248 CPU @ 2.50GHz
  (Cascade Lake)

  We're seeing a 3x slowdown on e.g. the following tiny program and similar slowdowns on important workloads:
  ```
  #include <stdio.h>
  #include <stdlib.h>
  #include <string.h>
  #include <time.h>

  int main(void) {
      size_t SIZE = (1 << 20);
      char *src = malloc(SIZE);
      char *dst = malloc(SIZE);

      for(int i = 0; i < (SIZE); ++i) {
          src[i] = rand() % 256;
          dst[i] = rand() % 256;
      }
      clock_t start = clock();
      for(int i = 0; i < 10000; ++i) {
          memcpy(dst, src, SIZE);
      }
      clock_t end = clock();
      printf("%f\n", (double) (end - start)/CLOCKS_PER_SEC);
  }
  ```

  Probably due to changes resulting from
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/glibc/+bug/1928508

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