| HN Mirror

The pigeonhole principle does not stipulate which hole the extra pigeons have to appear in. Only that at least one hole must have more than one pigeon. It does not stipulate that all holes have to have pigeons; you can have 999 empty pigeon holes, and then a hole that has 1001 pigeons in it. The pigeonhole principle doesn't care.

In Linux it's possible to stipulate that, for instance, core 7 can only be used by super secret process PID 1234. If you have 400 other threads, that means the other threads will have to compete for cores 0-6. And if super secret PID 1234 is idle and there are 12 threads that are marked for scheduling, then they get to just wait for cores 0-6 to become available while core 7 stands idle.

I watched a talk several years ago about a HFT firm that ... abused? this principle. They had a big ass monster of a machine. Four sockets, four CPUs with gobs of cores and gobs of cache on each one. But the only thing they cared about was the latency on their HFT trade sniping process. If they could reduce the latency of receiving interesting information to executing a trade on that interesting information from (making up numbers) 1.1ms to 0.9ms, that was potentially thousands, millions of dollars in profit.

So if CPU socket 0 has cores 0-15, CPU socket 1 has cores 16-31, CPU socket 2 has cores 32-47, CPU socket 3 has cores 48-63, they marked cores 17-31,33-47,49-63 to be usable by nothing. Those cores are permanently and forever idle. They will never execute a single instruction. Ever. Core 16 can be used by PID 12345 and only by PID 12345, core 32 can be used by PID 7362 and only PID 7362, and core 48 can be used by PID 8765 and only PID 8765. This ensured that all data and all instructions used by their super high priority HFT process can never, ever be evicted from the cache.

Apparently it made a notable improvement in latency and therefore profit.