astounding optimization! thanks nytprof!

We’ve been unhappy with the performance of some code, recently. I was pretty sure I knew where the problem was, but I thought I’d run NYTProf just to see how things looked. I’m running an older NYTprof, so it’s not 100% clear that my SQL-level optimization is what I need to do – but it’s the right thing to do anyway. Anyway, I figured I might see something sort of interesting, but I never expected this:

Calls     InclTime   ExclTime     Subroutine
 27,908        406        406     DBI::st::execute
543,412         79         31     Carp::caller_info

…and let’s not go any further. The program took almost exactly 600s to run. Of that, nearly five percent was because the program called Carp, and it called it a half million times! What?!

I won’t be coy, because I’m writing this while waiting for a test suite to run and while watching House. It turns out that it was related to this line:

Calls     InclTime   ExclTime     Subroutine
139,340        222          6     SUPER::get_all_parents

That subroutine looks like this:

sub get_all_parents {
  my ($invocant, $class) = @_;

  my @parents = eval { $invocant->__get_parents() };

  unless ( @parents ) {
    no strict 'refs';
    @parents = @{ $class . '::ISA' };
  }

  return 'UNIVERSAL' unless @parents;
  return @parents, map { get_all_parents( $_, $_ ) } @parents;
}

See how it calls $invocant->__get_parents? Well, that’s great, except that our internal ORM has an AUTOLOAD subroutine that looks like this:

sub AUTOLOAD {
  my $self = $_[0];
  my $class = (ref $self) || $self;
  (my $method = $AUTOLOAD) =~ s/.*:://;
  return if $method eq "DESTROY";
  unless (blessed($self)) {
    confess qq(AUTOLOAD: \$self for ->$method is not a blessed reference: )
      . Dumper($self);
  }

  ...
}

Now, to avoid hitting the database too much, we have a mixin that makes it talk to a memcached. That mixin (like many such modules) uses SUPER.pm. SUPER then calls __get_parents on our ORM, but hits the AUTOLOAD instead, and since that’s only supposed to work on objects, it confesses. It does this every time we check consider using a cached copy of an object, causing us to invoke Carp::confess a half million times.

The solution? I added this line to our ORM:

sub __get_parents { return; }

Shaved two minutes off the test case. That’s about 20%.

Written on November 12, 2008
🐫 perl
🧑🏽‍💻 programming