[PATCH v2 1/7] grep: don't redundantly compile throwaway patterns under threading

Change the pattern compilation logic under threading so that grep doesn't compile a pattern it never ends up using on the non-threaded code path, only to compile it again N times for N threads which will each use their own copy, ignoring the initially compiled pattern.

This redundant compilation dates back to the initial introduction of the threaded grep in commit 5b594f457a ("Threaded grep", 2010-01-25).

There was never any reason for doing this redundant work other than an oversight in the initial commit. Jeff King suggested on-list in <20170414212325.fefrl3qdjigwyitd@sigill.intra.peff.net> that this might be needed to check the pattern for sanity before threaded execution commences.

That's not the case. The pattern is compiled under threading in start_threads() before any concurrent execution has started by calling pthread_create(), so if the pattern contains an error we still do the right thing. I.e. die with one error before any threaded execution has commenced, instead of e.g. spewing out an error for each N threads, which could be a regression a change like this might inadvertently introduce.

This change is not meant as an optimization, any performance gains from this are in the hundreds to thousands of nanoseconds at most. If we wanted more performance here we could just re-use the compiled patterns in multiple threads (regcomp(3) is thread-safe), or partially re-use them and the associated structures in the case of later PCRE JIT changes.

Rather, it's just to make the code easier to reason about. It's confusing to debug this under threading & non-threading when the threading codepaths redundantly compile a pattern which is never used.

The reason the patterns are recompiled is as a side-effect of duplicating the whole grep_opt structure, which is not thread safe, writable, and munged during execution. The grep_opt structure then points to the grep_pat structure where pattern or patterns are stored.

I looked into e.g. splitting the API into some "do & alloc threadsafe stuff", "spawn thread", "do and alloc non-threadsafe stuff", but the execution time of grep_opt_dup() & pattern compilation is trivial compared to actually executing the grep, so there was no point. Even with the more expensive JIT changes to follow the most expensive PCRE patterns take something like 0.0X milliseconds to compile at most[1].

The undocumented --debug mode added in commit 17bf35a3c7 ("grep: teach --debug option to dump the parse tree", 2012-09-13) still works properly with this change. It only emits debugging info during pattern compilation, which is now dumped by the pattern compiled just before the first thread is started.

1. http://sljit.sourceforge.net/pcre.html

Signed-off-by: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
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 builtin/grep.c | 14 +++++++++++---
 1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)