Message 208532 - Python tracker (original) (raw)

Hi, while comparing performances of Tulip and Trollius projects (asyncio module), I found a bug. The event loop is called too many times when a callback is scheduled with a timeout and the epoll selector is used, especially for timeout close to one millisecond.

In my opinion, it's a bug in epoll.poll(): it should wait at least timeout seconds if no event is received, not shorter.

Pseudo-code of Tulip:

timeout = scheduled[0].when - time.monotonic() events = selector.select(timeout) process_events(events) while scheduled: if scheduled[0].when > time.monotonic(): break ...

The problem is that "scheduled[0].when > time.monotonic()" test fails because epoll.poll() returns in less than timeout seconds.

The difference between the timeout and elapsed time is very small, less than 1 millisecond.

Attached patch fixes this issue by rounding the timeout to the upper bound.

The rounding is different than datetime.timedelta constructor for example, because the usecase is different. epoll.poll(0.0001) calls epoll_wait() with a timemout of 1 millisecond (1e-4 rounded to 1e-3).

epoll.poll(0.0) still calls epoll_wait() with a timeout of 0 millisecond. I don't think that it's possible to write a reliable unit test for that on our slow buildbots.