Finish up LOAD_ATTR specialisation

We should target the following specialisation failures:

has managed dict
not in dict (how does this even happen??)

With these two we can hit >90% specialisation successes.
If we're feeling really ambitious, we could aim for "not managed dict" failure too. But we don't need that to achieve >90% successes.

I'm doing the first one. Is anyone interested in investigating the second specialisation failure?

Linked PRs

Oh I am interested in if you don't mind?

Sure! Go ahead!

@markshannon

CC @markshannon just these two added specialisations should net us 10% all specialisation failures/successes, bringing us to over 90% specialisation successes.

@corona10

@corona10 seems like the stats were misleading, not in dict is actually the following:

class C: 
    i = 0

c = C()
c.i # this fails to specialise

So it's a class attribute lookup, which makes more sense.

Thanks I read the PR too: #100295

Regarding "not managed dict" failures, I think the approach should be to reduce the number of objects that don't have managed dicts, not specialize for them.

We can tweak the management of cached keys, and do some static analysis in the compiler to do that.

gh-100288: Specialise LOAD_ATTR_METHOD for managed dictionaries (GH-1…

Revert "pythongh-100288: Specialise LOAD_ATTR_METHOD for managed dict…

Revert "gh-100288: Specialise LOAD_ATTR_METHOD for managed dictionari…

Merged main into regmachine branch (#50)

Has managed dict isn't worth specialising for - Mark's stats show it has a 40% miss rate and comparing with lats week's stats, it increased the hit rate from 82.0% to 82.5% only.

I have a suspicion we are just about at the point of diminishing returns for LOAD_ATTR. We still have Dong-hee's specialisation for class attributes (that might also be not worth the effort, but it's good to try).

It might not be possible to get LOAD_ATTR hit rates to 90% due to natural polymorphism/dynamism in attribute loads, and I think that's perfectly acceptable.

The top remaining failures look like this:

What	count	fraction
class attr simple	579,637	35.4%
has managed dict	577,900	35.3%
not managed dict	258,867	15.8%

"class attr simple" is stuff like

class C:
     a = 1
c = C()
c.a

We should be able to handle this fairly easily.

I think the way to deal with the second and third cases is to ensure more objects have values arrays and do not have materialized dicts, not more specializations.

We can still get the specialization rates up to ~95%

GH-100288: Remove LOAD_ATTR_METHOD_WITH_DICT instruction. (GH-100753)

Merge branch 'main' into makefile

Merge branch 'main' into fieldrepr

I think the remaining cases are just too polymorphic.

For example, adding LOAD_ATTR_CLASS_FROM_INSTANCE to handle the "class attr simple" case barely moves the LOAD_ATTR hit rate (the results are "1.00x faster", and the miss rate for the new opcode is ~32%). We can add it if we want, but I'm just not sure it's worth it.

Don't forget that additional specializations will provide longer term benefits, not just speed ups in the base interpreter.
More specializations mean better type feedback and potentially longer traces, providing larger regions for optimization for higher tiers.

We should push specialization not just to the point of diminishing returns in terms of speed, but to the edge of negative returns.

I don't think it is worth making the interpreter slower to get more type information, at least not yet, but as long as we aren't slowing things down we should push specialization as far as we can.

The miss rate of 32% seems high, it might be worth a bit of investigation. It might well be polymorphism, but it might be a bug somewhere.
Could you make a (maybe draft) PR, as it sounds like you already have working code?

Here you go: #101379.

Another observation that may help us with the "materialized, managed dict" cases:

I suspect that the vast majority of instance __dict__s are created to be read, or lightly written. Until they overflow the shared keys size or gain a non-unicode key, they still share keys with all of the other virtual dicts (and real __dict__s) for all other instances of the class.

We can probably take advantage of this, right? If we check that dict->ma_keys == heap_type->ht_cached_keys, then its attribute loads can still work just like LOAD_ATTR_INSTANCE_VALUE. The only difference is that we get the values from _PyDictOrValues_GetDict(dorv)->ma_values instead of _PyDictOrValues_GetValues(dorv).

Just an observation I had while looking at this stuff. Seems like it could simplify LOAD_ATTR_WITH_HINT and STORE_ATTR_WITH_HINT quite a bit.

Other notes on LOAD_ATTR_WITH_HINT:

I'm surprised that we handle non-unicode managed __dict__s here. It seems like it makes way more sense to just deopt in that case.
I think it will always fail (res = ep->me_value; DEOPT_IF(res == NULL, LOAD_ATTR)) for split tables... which is the common case, right?

I think it will always fail (res = ep->me_value; DEOPT_IF(res == NULL, LOAD_ATTR)) for split tables... which is the common case, right?

...though it looks like it only has a 2.5% miss rate, so I could be missing something here.

There is some co-design with object layout to consider as well.

All objects with dicts should use the new layout. Rather than fix LOAD_ATTR to handle them, we should fix the classes.
With that done, LOAD_ATTR_WITH_HINT and STORE_ATTR_WITH_HINT can be removed
We can't remove uses of __dict__ in Python code, so we will need the extra instruction you propose.

Can we change object layout a bit, so that a single instruction can handle objects with and without a `dict`?

I don't know of a way to do this without slowing down the common case, but it something to bear in mind.

GH-100288: Skip extra work when failing to specialize LOAD_ATTR (GH-1…

Merge branch 'main' into inlinecomp2

GH-100288: Specialize LOAD_ATTR for simple class attributes. (#105990)

GH-100288: regen cases after #105990 (#106589)

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Finish up LOAD_ATTR specialisation #100288

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Can we change object layout a bit, so that a single instruction can handle objects with and without a `dict`?

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Finish up LOAD_ATTR specialisation #100288

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corona10 commented on Dec 16, 2022

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markshannon commented on Jan 29, 2023

Can we change object layout a bit, so that a single instruction can handle objects with and without a __dict__?

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Can we change object layout a bit, so that a single instruction can handle objects with and without a `dict`?