runtime: time.Sleep takes more time than expected on Windows (1ms -> 10ms)

[egonelbre]

This seems to be a regression with Go 1.16 time.Sleep.

What version of Go are you using (go version)?

$ go version
go version go1.16 windows/amd64

Does this issue reproduce with the latest release?

Yes.

What operating system and processor architecture are you using (go env)?

go env Output

$ go env
set GO111MODULE=
set GOARCH=amd64
set GOBIN=
set GOCACHE=Z:\gocache
set GOENV=C:\Users\egone\AppData\Roaming\go\env
set GOEXE=.exe
set GOFLAGS=
set GOHOSTARCH=amd64
set GOHOSTOS=windows
set GOINSECURE=
set GOMODCACHE=F:\Go\pkg\mod
set GONOPROXY=
set GONOSUMDB=
set GOOS=windows
set GOPATH=F:\Go
set GOPRIVATE=
set GOPROXY=https://proxy.golang.org,direct
set GOROOT=c:\go
set GOSUMDB=sum.golang.org
set GOTMPDIR=
set GOTOOLDIR=c:\go\pkg\tool\windows_amd64
set GOVCS=
set GOVERSION=go1.16
set GCCGO=gccgo
set AR=ar
set CC=gcc
set CXX=g++
set CGO_ENABLED=1
set GOMOD=f:\temp\sleep\go.mod
set CGO_CFLAGS=-g -O2
set CGO_CPPFLAGS=
set CGO_CXXFLAGS=-g -O2
set CGO_FFLAGS=-g -O2
set CGO_LDFLAGS=-g -O2
set PKG_CONFIG=pkg-config
set GOGCCFLAGS=-m64 -mthreads -fmessage-length=0 -fdebug-prefix-map=Z:\Temp\go-build3014714148=/tmp/go-build -gno-record-gcc-switches

What did you do?

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"time"

	"github.com/loov/hrtime"
)

func main() {
	b := hrtime.NewBenchmark(100)
	for b.Next() {
		time.Sleep(50 * time.Microsecond)
	}
	fmt.Println(b.Histogram(10))
}

hrtime is a package that uses RDTSC for time measurements.

Output on Windows 10:

> go1.16 run .
  avg 15.2ms;  min 55.3µs;  p50 15.5ms;  max 16.3ms;
  p90 16.1ms;  p99 16.3ms;  p999 16.3ms;  p9999 16.3ms;
     55.3µs [  2] █
        2ms [  0]
        4ms [  0]
        6ms [  0]
        8ms [  0]
       10ms [  1] ▌
       12ms [  0]
       14ms [ 75] ████████████████████████████████████████
       16ms [ 22] ███████████▌
       18ms [  0]

> go1.15.8 run .
  avg 1.03ms;  min 63.9µs;  p50 1ms;  max 2.3ms;
  p90 1.29ms;  p99 2.3ms;  p999 2.3ms;  p9999 2.3ms;
     63.9µs [  1] ▌
      500µs [ 47] ███████████████████████████████████████
        1ms [ 48] ████████████████████████████████████████
      1.5ms [  1] ▌
        2ms [  3] ██
      2.5ms [  0]
        3ms [  0]
      3.5ms [  0]
        4ms [  0]
      4.5ms [  0]

Output on Linux (Debian 10):

$ go1.16 run test.go
  avg 1.06ms;  min 1.06ms;  p50 1.06ms;  max 1.08ms;
  p90 1.07ms;  p99 1.08ms;  p999 1.08ms;  p9999 1.08ms;
     1.06ms [  4] █▌
     1.07ms [ 84] ████████████████████████████████████████
     1.07ms [  7] ███
     1.08ms [  3] █
     1.08ms [  1]
     1.09ms [  1]
     1.09ms [  0]
      1.1ms [  0]
      1.1ms [  0]
     1.11ms [  0]

$ go1.15.8 run test.go
  avg 86.7µs;  min 57.3µs;  p50 83.6µs;  max 132µs;
  p90 98.3µs;  p99 132µs;  p999 132µs;  p9999 132µs;
     57.3µs [  2] █
       60µs [  1] ▌
       70µs [ 13] ████████
       80µs [ 64] ████████████████████████████████████████
       90µs [ 11] ██████▌
      100µs [  2] █
      110µs [  1] ▌
      120µs [  3] █▌
      130µs [  3] █▌
      140µs [  0]

The time granularity shouldn't be that bad even for Windows. So, there might be something going wrong somewhere.

[egonelbre]

It looks like this happened in 8fdc79e. https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/232298

CC: @ChrisHines

[bcmills]

That same CL shook out a number of kernel and runtime bugs in various configurations. (See previously #43067, #42515, #42237; cc @prattmic.)

[ianlancetaylor]

CC @mknyszek @aclements

[prattmic]

This is reproducible with a trivial benchmark in time package:

func BenchmarkSimpleSleep(b *testing.B) {
       for i := 0; i < b.N; i++ {
               Sleep(50*Microsecond)
       }
}

amd64/linux, before/after http://golang.org/cl/232298:

name            old time/op  new time/op   delta
SimpleSleep-12  86.9µs ± 0%  609.8µs ± 5%  +601.73%  (p=0.000 n=10+9)

[prattmic]

For reference, across different sleep times:

name                  old time/op  new time/op   delta
SimpleSleep/1ns-12     460ns ± 3%    479ns ± 1%    +4.03%  (p=0.000 n=10+9)
SimpleSleep/100ns-12   466ns ± 3%    476ns ± 2%    +2.35%  (p=0.001 n=10+9)
SimpleSleep/500ns-12  6.47µs ±11%   6.70µs ± 5%      ~     (p=0.105 n=10+10)
SimpleSleep/1µs-12    10.3µs ±10%   12.2µs ±13%   +18.23%  (p=0.000 n=10+10)
SimpleSleep/10µs-12   81.9µs ± 1%  502.5µs ± 4%  +513.45%  (p=0.000 n=10+10)
SimpleSleep/50µs-12   87.0µs ± 0%  622.9µs ±18%  +615.69%  (p=0.000 n=8+10)
SimpleSleep/100µs-12   179µs ± 0%   1133µs ± 1%  +533.52%  (p=0.000 n=8+10)
SimpleSleep/500µs-12   592µs ± 0%   1137µs ± 1%   +91.97%  (p=0.000 n=10+10)
SimpleSleep/1ms-12    1.12ms ± 2%   1.14ms ± 1%    +1.36%  (p=0.000 n=9+10)
SimpleSleep/10ms-12   10.2ms ± 0%   10.3ms ± 0%    +0.79%  (p=0.000 n=9+9)

[prattmic]

Looking at the 100µs, the immediate problem is the delay resolution in netpoll.

Prior to http://golang.org/cl/232298, 95% of timer expirations in the 100µs case are detected by sysmon, which calls startm to wake an M to handle the timer (though this is not a particularly efficient approach).

After http://golang.org/cl/232298, this path is gone and the wakeup must come from netpoll (assuming all Ms are parked/blocked). netpoll on Linux only has 1ms resolution, so it must sleep at least that long before detecting the timer.

I'm not sure why I'm seeing ~500µs on the 10µs and 50µs benchmarks, but I may have bimodal distribution where ~50% of cases a spinning M is still awake long enough to detect the timer before entering netpoll.

I'm also not sure why @egonelbre is seeing ~14ms on Windows, as that also appears to have 1ms resolution on netpoll.

[prattmic]

I think the ideal fix to this would be to increase the resolution of netpoll. Even for longer timers, this limited resolution will cause slight skew to timer delivery (though of course there are no real-time guarantees).

As it happens, Linux v5.11 includes epoll_pwait2 which switches the timeout argument to a timespec for nanosecond resolution. Unfortunately, Linux v5.11 was released ... 3 days ago, so availability is not widespread to say the least.

In the past, I've also prototyped changing the netpoll timeout to being controlled by a timerfd (with the intention of being able to adjust the timer earlier without a full netpollBreak). That could be an option as well.

Both of these are Linux-specific solutions, I'd have to research other platforms more to get a sense of the options there.

We also may just want to bring the sysmon wakeup back, perhaps with slight overrun allowed to avoid excessive M wakeups.

[ianlancetaylor]

I guess that wakeNetPoller doesn't help, because there is no poller sleeping at the point of calling time.Sleep.

Perhaps when netpoll sees a delay that is shorter than the poller resolution it should just do a non-blocking poll. That will effectively turn findrunnable into a busy wait when the next timer is very soon.

[ChrisHines]

While working on CL232298 I definitely observed anecdotal evidence that the netpoller has more latency than other ways of sleeping. From #38860 (comment):

My anecdotal observation here is that it appears the Linux netpoller implementation has more latency when waking after a timeout than the Go 1.13 timerproc implementation. Most of these benchmark numbers replicate on my Mac laptop, but the darwin netpoller seems to suffer less of that particular latency by comparison, and is also worse in other ways. So it may not be possible to close the gap with Go 1.13 purely in the scheduler code. Relying on the netpoller for timers changes the behavior as well, but these new numbers are at least in the same order of magnitude as Go 1.13.

I didn't try to address that in CL232298 primarily because it was already risky enough that I didn't want to make bigger changes. But an idea for something to try occurred to me back then. Maybe we could improve the latency of non-network timers by having one M block on a notesleep call instead of the netpoller. That would require findrunnable to compute two wakeup times, one for net timers to pass to the netpoller and one for all other timers to use with notesleep depending on which role it takes on (if any) when it cannot find any other work.

I haven't fully gauged how messy that would get.

Questions and concerns:

• Coordinating two sleeping M's probably has complicating edge cases to figure out.
• I haven't tested the latency of notesleep wakeups to know if it would actually help.
• Would it require duplicating all the timer fields on each P, one for net timers and one for the others?

One other oddity that I noticed when testing CL232298: The linux netpoller sometimes wakes up from the timeout value early by a several microseconds. When that happens findrunnable usually does not find any expired timers since they haven't actually expired yet. A new--very short--pollUntil value gets computed and the M reenters the netpoller. The subsequent wakeup is then typically rather late, maybe up to 1ms, but I am going from memory here. I might be able to dig up some trace logs showing this behavior if I still have them and people are interested.

[prattmic]

I guess that wakeNetPoller doesn't help, because there is no poller sleeping at the point of calling time.Sleep.

wakeNetPoller shouldn't matter either way, because even if we wake the netpoller, it will just sleep again with a new timeout of 1ms, which is too long. (Unless wakeNetPoller happens to take so long that the timer has expired by the time the woken M gets to checkTimers).

Perhaps when netpoll sees a delay that is shorter than the poller resolution it should just do a non-blocking poll. That will effectively turn findrunnable into a busy wait when the next timer is very soon.

Maybe we could improve the latency of non-network timers by having one M block on a notesleep call instead of the netpoller.

As somewhat of a combination of these, one potential option would be to make netpoll with a short timeout do non-blocking netpoll, short notetsleep, non-blocking netpoll. Though this has the disadvantage of slightly increasing latency of network events from netpoll.

One other oddity that I noticed when testing CL232298: The linux netpoller sometimes wakes up from the timeout value early by a several microseconds. When that happens findrunnable usually does not find any expired timers since they haven't actually expired yet. A new--very short--pollUntil value gets computed and the M reenters the netpoller. The subsequent wakeup is then typically rather late, maybe up to 1ms, but I am going from memory here. I might be able to dig up some trace logs showing this behavior if I still have them and people are interested.

Hm, this sounds like another bug, or perhaps a spurious netpollBreak from another M.

[prattmic]

It seems that on Windows, notetsleep has 1ms precision in addition to netpoll, so the explanation in #44343 (comment) doesn't explain the increase in latency on Windows.

[ChrisHines]

My first thought on the Windows behavior is that somehow osRelax is being mismanaged and allowing the timer resolution to decrease to its resting mode. That thought is driven by the spike on the above histograms at 15ms. I haven't thought through how that might happen now.

[ChrisHines]

Hm, this sounds like another bug, or perhaps a spurious netpollBreak from another M.

That could be, but I was logging at least some of the calls to netpollBreak as well and don't recall seeing seeing that happen. I saved my logging code in case it can help. https://github.com/ChrisHines/go/tree/dlog-backup

[vellotis]

For reference, output on my Windows 10:

> go1.16 run .
  avg 1.06ms;  min 475µs;  p50 1.01ms;  max 1.99ms;
  p90 1.13ms;  p99 1.99ms;  p999 1.99ms;  p9999 1.99ms;
      475µs [  1] ▌
      600µs [  1] ▌
      800µs [ 36] ██████████████████████████
        1ms [ 55] ████████████████████████████████████████
      1.2ms [  0]
      1.4ms [  0]
      1.6ms [  0]
      1.8ms [  7] █████
        2ms [  0]
      2.2ms [  0]

A totally different results from the #44343 (comment).

go env Output

$ go env
set GO111MODULE=on
set GOARCH=amd64
set GOBIN=
set GOCACHE=C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\go-build
set GOENV=C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\go\env
set GOEXE=.exe
set GOFLAGS=
set GOHOSTARCH=amd64
set GOHOSTOS=windows
set GOINSECURE=
set GOMODCACHE=C:\Projects\Go\pkg\mod
set GONOPROXY=
set GONOSUMDB=
set GOOS=windows
set GOPATH=C:\Projects\Go
set GOPRIVATE=
set GOPROXY=
set GOROOT=C:\Tools\Go\go1.16
set GOSUMDB=sum.golang.org
set GOTMPDIR=
set GOTOOLDIR=C:\Tools\Go\go1.16\pkg\tool\windows_amd64
set GOVCS=
set GOVERSION=go1.16
set GCCGO=gccgo
set AR=ar
set CC=gcc
set CXX=g++
set CGO_ENABLED=1
set GOMOD=NUL
set CGO_CFLAGS=-g -O2
set CGO_CPPFLAGS=
set CGO_CXXFLAGS=-g -O2
set CGO_FFLAGS=-g -O2
set CGO_LDFLAGS=-g -O2
set PKG_CONFIG=pkg-config
set GOGCCFLAGS=-m64 -mthreads -fno-caret-diagnostics -Qunused-arguments -fmessage-length=0 -fdebug-prefix-map=C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Temp\go-build2862485594=/tmp/go-build -gno-record-gcc-switches

[egonelbre]

@vellotis this could be because there's something running in the background changing Windows timer resolution. This could be some other Go service/binary built using older Go version. Of course there can plenty of other programs that may change it.

You can use https://github.com/tebjan/TimerTool to see what the current value is. There's some more detail in https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-resolution-megawatts-wasted.

[zobkiw]

For what it's worth, go1.16.2 darwin/amd64 is also exhibiting this. In a program I'm running, the line time.Sleep(1 * time.Hour) takes roughly an hour and 3 minutes each time.

[prattmic]

@zobkiw It sounds like they is more likely to be related to #44868. I'm also curious if the failure is consistent and it really is always 1hr 3min, not 1hr 2min (or rather, ranging from 2-4min since alignment with 2min forcegc will vary)?

[zobkiw]

@prattmic Strangely, I just checked the output of the script now and (although I just restarted it a few hours before) it was spot on at one hour twice in a row. However, yesterday it was "generally" 3 minutes. I don't have an exact time since we were only seeing the minute logged. It was always 3 minutes (rounded) from the previous run. 1:00pm, 2:03pm, 3:06pm, 4:09pm, etc.

Some things to note about this loop I'm running, it is calling a shell script using exec.Command before sleeping for an hour, then it does it again. The script takes about 10 seconds to execute and completes its job. It is also running in a screen session but so was the one this morning that was doing fine so I don't think that was it. The machine it was running on, a mac mini, was basically idle other that this lightweight job.

If you have some code you would like me to run I would be happy to - otherwise I will keep an eye on it here as well and report anything else I see. Hopefully some of this is helpful in narrowing down the cause if you haven't already.

UPDATE 3-20-2021 10am ET: I just ran my program for about the last 24 hours and sure enough, it would run fine for the first few iterations and then start to sleep longer based on the logging. Mostly it would hover between 3-5 minutes late but once it was 9 minutes! I've (this morning) written another program using the same logic but with simulated activity (since the actual tasks did not seem to be part of the problem) and much more detailed logging. I have it running now in 3 environments, two using screen and one not. It is running on an M1 Big Sur 11.2.3 and an Intel mac mini running the same. One thing that struck me this morning was wondering if the machine being asleep at all caused the delay. Since it runs OK for awhile (while I was using the machine presumably) and then had the delays over night. This morning, the latest reading (while I was using the machine again to install the new test code) was back to 1 hour spot on - no delay. Once I get some more data at the end of the day or tomorrow morning I will report back and share the code if there remains a problem.

[tandr]

3 minutes per hour is rather worrisome, especially if some cron-like functionality required in a long-running service...

[networkimprov]

In case it's related; on Windows, timers tick while the system is in standby/suspend, but they pause on other platforms.

This is supposed to have been addressed already #36141

[zobkiw]

@prattmic et al, I took the liberty of writing a testbed to experiment with this issue. See all the details of test runs on Linux, Intel, and M1, along with source code here:

https://github.com/zobkiw/sleeptest

Comments welcome - especially if you find a bug in the code. Also, see the results directory for the output of the tests. Regardless, these results seem strange to me. I look forward to other input on this issue.

[networkimprov]

cc @zx2c4 :-)

[egonelbre]

@zobkiw could it be something due to cpu frequency scaling? Can you try locking the cpu to a specific frequency (something low) and see whether the problem disappears?

[jxqu3]

Is there any workaround I can use for my program to sleep with a high resolution while this gets fixed?
EDIT:
syscall.NewLazyDLL("winmm.dll").NewProc("timeBeginPeriod").Call(1) seems to fix it ;)
EDIT 2: Just realised windows.TimeBeginPeriod(1) is already out

[johnrs]

/*
init() switches the Windows system clock from 15.6ms to 1ms.
@ In the future (v1.22): golang.org/x/sys/windows.TimeBeginPeriod
*/
func init() {
	winmmDLL := syscall.NewLazyDLL("winmm.dll")
	procTimeBeginPeriod := winmmDLL.NewProc("timeBeginPeriod")
	procTimeBeginPeriod.Call(uintptr(1))
}

[qmuntal]

NtCreateWaitCompletionPacket and friends required for #44343 (comment) have been officially documented 😄 @thepudds.

This means that I'll try to land CL 488675 in go1.23, which will improve timer resolution to ~1ms.

[thepudds]

That’s great @qmuntal! This should be a very nice step forward for Windows users.

[thepudds]

This is a very long issue, with 150 hidden comments currently. For a period of time, the title here was:

• runtime: time.Sleep takes more time than expected on Windows

In Sept 2023, the title was changed to add and Linux+others (80us -> 1ms).

In the interests of making things more manageable, I suggest we re-focus this issue back on Windows so that @qmuntal's https://go.dev/cl/488675 could hopefully close this issue. (This issue also has a decent amount of external visibility, including it was cited as a reason some Windows users couldn't upgrade to modern Go versions, so it would be nice for clarity if @qmuntal's change could close this issue).

If that sounds reasonable, I'd be happy to open a new issue for Linux if there isn't one already.

Alternatively, if @prattmic thinks the WIP https://go.dev/cl/363417 (which switches to epoll_pwait2 on Linux) or something similar has a chance of landing for Go 1.23 to improve things for Linux as well, then maybe this issue could be both for Windows and Linux. (Even so, I'm not sure there is an improvement pending in the near term for "other" OSes).

---

Separately, I wanted to copy here for posterity an explanation @prattmic gave earlier today in Gopher Slack in response to someone observing that on Linux they were "seeing a weird mix of certain sub-ms sleeps being serviced timely, and some rounding to 1ms":

Timers are tracked with nanosecond resolution. If the runtime enters the scheduler, it will service any expired timers with full resolution. But if the runtime goes fully idle, it will wait for the next timer expiration with the epoll_wait timeout, which has 1ms resolution. We've been meaning to switch to epoll_pwait2, which has ns resolution.

@prattmic had some related comments about epoll_pwait2 earlier in #44343 (comment) and #44343 (comment), when epoll_pwait2 was only freshly available, as well as mentioning there that bringing back some form of sysmon wakeup or using timerfd might help things.

One final reference for posterity is that I had tried in #44343 (comment) to summarize the state of this issue with some links to other key comments as of March 2023.

---

(In short, after re-skimming this issue just now, I'm hoping to avoid re-skimming this issue ever again 😅).

[thepudds]

Seeing a few thumbs up and hearing no objection so far, I am going to change this issue title to re-focus back on Windows. If someone has a different opinion, feel free of course to edit the title again.

It looks like #53824 is already tracking using use epoll_pwait2 for Linux. (It also looks like an external contributor sent CL 449815 to use epoll_pwait2 based on @prattmic's earlier epoll_pwait2 CL, but they eventually got stuck on some test failures that needed investigation -- if anyone is interested, some basic triage of those failures could be a way to help move things forward).

[qmuntal]

FYI: CL 488675 has been merged.

The new time resolution on Windows with high resolution timers is now ~0.5ms, measured using the code from the issue description:

  avg 513µs;  min 17.4µs;  p50 531µs;  max 722µs;
  p90 558µs;  p99 722µs;  p999 722µs;  p9999 722µs;
     17.4µs [  2] ▌
      100µs [  2] ▌
      200µs [  2] ▌
      300µs [  1]
      400µs [  3] █
      500µs [ 84] ████████████████████████████████████████
      600µs [  5] ██
      700µs [  1]
      800µs [  0]
      900µs [  0]

[gopherbot]

Change https://go.dev/cl/614435 mentions this issue: _content/doc/go1.23: document Windows timers resulution improvements