Am I doing something wrong here?
Do not panic, many users do the very same - Paid more than received.
This is a common lecture not on using some "promising" syntax-constructor, but on paying the actual costs for using it.
The story is long, the effect was straightforward - you expected a low hanging fruit, but had to pay an immense cost of process-instantiation, work-package re-distribution and for collection of results, all that circus just for doing but a few rounds of func()-calls.
Wow?
Stop!
Parallelisation was brought to me that will SPEEDUP processing?!?
Well, who told you that any such ( potential ) speedup is for free?
Let's be quantitative and rather measure the actual code-execution time, instead of emotions, right?
Benchmarking is always a fair move.
It helps us, mortals, to escape from just expectations
and get ourselves into quantitative records-of-evidence supported knowledge:
from zmq import Stopwatch; aClk = Stopwatch() # this is a handy tool to do so
AS-IS test:
Before moving forwards, one ought record this pair:
>>> aClk.start(); _ = [ func( SEQi ) for SEQi in inp ]; aClk.stop() # [SEQ]
>>> HowMuchWillWePAY2RUN( func, 4, 100 ) # [RUN]
>>> HowMuchWillWePAY2MAP( func, 4, 100 ) # [MAP]
This will set the span among the performance envelopes from a pure-[SERIAL] [SEQ]-of-calls, to an un-optimised joblib.Parallel() or any other, if one wishes to extend the experiment with any other tools, like a said multiprocessing.Pool() or other.
Test-case A:
Intent:
so as to measure the cost of a { process | job }-instantiation, we need a NOP-work-package payload, that will spend almost nothing "there" but return "back" and will not require to pay any additional add-on costs ( be it for any input parameters' transmissions or returning any value )
def a_NOP_FUN( aNeverConsumedPAR ):
""" __doc__
The intent of this FUN() is indeed to do nothing at all,
so as to be able to benchmark
all the process-instantiation
add-on overhead costs.
"""
pass
So, the setup-overhead add-on costs comparison is here:
#-------------------------------------------------------<function a_NOP_FUN
[SEQ]-pure-[SERIAL] worked within ~ 37 .. 44 [us] on this localhost
[MAP]-just-[CONCURENT] tool 2536 .. 7343 [us]
[RUN]-just-[CONCURENT] tool 111162 .. 112609 [us]
Using a strategy of
joblib.delayed() on joblib.Parallel() task-processing:
def HowMuchWillWePAY2RUN( aFun2TEST = a_NOP_FUN, JOBS_TO_SPAWN = 4, RUNS_TO_RUN = 10 ):
from zmq import Stopwatch; aClk = Stopwatch()
try:
aClk.start()
joblib.Parallel( n_jobs = JOBS_TO_SPAWN
)( joblib.delayed( aFun2TEST )
( aFunPARAM )
for ( aFunPARAM )
in range( RUNS_TO_RUN )
)
except:
pass
finally:
try:
_ = aClk.stop()
except:
_ = -1
pass
pass; pMASK = "CLK:: {0:_>24d} [us] @{1: >4d}-JOBs ran{2: >6d} RUNS {3:}"
print( pMASK.format( _,
JOBS_TO_SPAWN,
RUNS_TO_RUN,
" ".join( repr( aFun2TEST ).split( " ")[:2] )
)
)
Using a strategy of a lightweight
.map_async() method on a multiprocessing.Pool() instance:
def HowMuchWillWePAY2MAP( aFun2TEST = a_NOP_FUN, PROCESSES_TO_SPAWN = 4, RUNS_TO_RUN = 1 ):
from zmq import Stopwatch; aClk = Stopwatch()
try:
import numpy as np
import multiprocessing as mp
pool = mp.Pool( processes = PROCESSES_TO_SPAWN )
inp = np.linspace( 0.01, 1.99, 100 )
aClk.start()
for i in xrange( RUNS_TO_RUN ):
pass; result = pool.map_async( aFun2TEST, inp )
output = result.get()
pass
except:
pass
finally:
try:
_ = aClk.stop()
except:
_ = -1
pass
pass; pMASK = "CLK:: {0:_>24d} [us] @{1: >4d}-PROCs ran{2: >6d} RUNS {3:}"
print( pMASK.format( _,
PROCESSES_TO_SPAWN,
RUNS_TO_RUN,
" ".join( repr( aFun2TEST ).split( " ")[:2] )
)
)
So,
the first set of pain and surprises
comes straight at the actual cost-of-doing-NOTHING in a concurrent pool of joblib.Parallel():
CLK:: __________________117463 [us] @ 4-JOBs ran 10 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: __________________111182 [us] @ 3-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: __________________110229 [us] @ 3-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: __________________110095 [us] @ 3-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: __________________111794 [us] @ 3-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: __________________110030 [us] @ 3-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: __________________110697 [us] @ 3-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: _________________4605843 [us] @ 123-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: __________________336208 [us] @ 123-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: __________________298816 [us] @ 123-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: __________________355492 [us] @ 123-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: __________________320837 [us] @ 123-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: __________________308365 [us] @ 123-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: __________________372762 [us] @ 123-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: __________________304228 [us] @ 123-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: __________________337537 [us] @ 123-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: __________________941775 [us] @ 123-JOBs ran 10000 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: __________________987440 [us] @ 123-JOBs ran 10000 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: _________________1080024 [us] @ 123-JOBs ran 10000 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: _________________1108432 [us] @ 123-JOBs ran 10000 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
CLK:: _________________7525874 [us] @ 123-JOBs ran100000 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN
So, this scientifically fair and rigorous test started from this simplest ever case, already showing the benchmarked costs of all the associated code-execution processing setup-overheads a smallest ever joblib.Parallel() penalty sine-qua-non.
This forwards us into a direction, where real-world algorithms do live - best with next adding some larger and larger "payload"-sizes into the testing loop.
Now, we know the penalty
for going into a "just"-[CONCURRENT] code-execution - and next?
Using this systematic and lightweight approach, we may go forwards in the story, as we will need to also benchmark the add-on costs and other Amdahl's Law indirect effects of { remote-job-PAR-XFER(s) | remote-job-MEM.alloc(s) | remote-job-CPU-bound-processing | remote-job-fileIO(s) }
A function template like this may help in re-testing ( as you see there will be a lot to re-run, while the O/S noise and some additional artifacts will step into the actual cost-of-use patterns ):
Test-case B:
Once we have paid the up-front cost, the next most common mistake is to forget the costs of memory allocations. So, lets test it:
def a_NOP_FUN_WITH_JUST_A_MEM_ALLOCATOR( aNeverConsumedPAR, SIZE1D = 1000 ):
""" __doc__
The intent of this FUN() is to do nothing but
a MEM-allocation
so as to be able to benchmark
all the process-instantiation
add-on overhead costs.
"""
import numpy as np # yes, deferred import, libs do defer imports
aMemALLOC = np.zeros( ( SIZE1D, # so as to set
SIZE1D, # realistic ceilings
SIZE1D, # as how big the "Big Data"
SIZE1D # may indeed grow into
),
dtype = np.float64,
order = 'F'
) # .ALLOC + .SET
aMemALLOC[2,3,4,5] = 8.7654321 # .SET
aMemALLOC[3,3,4,5] = 1.2345678 # .SET
return aMemALLOC[2:3,3,4,5]
In case your platform will stop to be able to allocate the requested memory-blocks, there we head-bang into another kind of problems ( with a class of hidden glass-ceilings if trying to go-parallel in a physical-resources agnostic manner ). One may edit the SIZE1D scaling, so as to at least fit into the platform RAM addressing / sizing capabilites, yet, the performance envelopes of the real-world problem computing are still of our great interest here:
>>> HowMuchWillWePAY2RUN( a_NOP_FUN_WITH_JUST_A_MEM_ALLOCATOR, 200, 1000 )
may yield
a cost-to-pay, being anything between 0.1 [s] and +9 [s] (!!)
just for doing STILL NOTHING, but now also without forgetting about some realistic MEM-allocation add-on costs "there"
CLK:: __________________116310 [us] @ 4-JOBs ran 10 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN_WITH_JUST_A_MEM_ALLOCATOR
CLK:: __________________120054 [us] @ 4-JOBs ran 10 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN_WITH_JUST_A_MEM_ALLOCATOR
CLK:: __________________129441 [us] @ 10-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN_WITH_JUST_A_MEM_ALLOCATOR
CLK:: __________________123721 [us] @ 10-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN_WITH_JUST_A_MEM_ALLOCATOR
CLK:: __________________127126 [us] @ 10-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN_WITH_JUST_A_MEM_ALLOCATOR
CLK:: __________________124028 [us] @ 10-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN_WITH_JUST_A_MEM_ALLOCATOR
CLK:: __________________305234 [us] @ 100-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN_WITH_JUST_A_MEM_ALLOCATOR
CLK:: __________________243386 [us] @ 100-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN_WITH_JUST_A_MEM_ALLOCATOR
CLK:: __________________241410 [us] @ 100-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a_NOP_FUN_WITH_JUST_A_MEM_ALLOCATOR
CLK:: __________________267275 [us] @ 100-JOBs ran 100 RUNS <function a
