Date:   Tue, 12 Apr 2022 21:09:59 -0700
From:   Andrii Nakryiko <andrii.nakryiko@...il.com>
To:     Hou Tao <houtao1@...wei.com>
Cc:     Alexei Starovoitov <ast@...nel.org>, Yonghong Song <yhs@...com>,
        Daniel Borkmann <daniel@...earbox.net>,
        Martin KaFai Lau <kafai@...com>,
        Andrii Nakryiko <andrii@...nel.org>,
        Song Liu <songliubraving@...com>,
        KP Singh <kpsingh@...nel.org>,
        "David S . Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>,
        Jakub Kicinski <kuba@...nel.org>,
        John Fastabend <john.fastabend@...il.com>,
        Networking <netdev@...r.kernel.org>, bpf <bpf@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH bpf-next 0/2] bpf: Introduce ternary search tree for
 string key

On Fri, Apr 8, 2022 at 8:08 PM Hou Tao <houtao1@...wei.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On 4/7/2022 1:38 AM, Andrii Nakryiko wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 31, 2022 at 5:04 AM Hou Tao <houtao1@...wei.com> wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> The initial motivation for the patchset is due to the suggestion of Alexei.
> >> During the discuss of supporting of string key in hash-table, he saw the
> >> space efficiency of ternary search tree under our early test and suggest
> >> us to post it as a new bpf map [1].
> >>
> >> Ternary search tree is a special trie where nodes are arranged in a
> >> manner similar to binary search tree, but with up to three children
> >> rather than two. The three children correpond to nodes whose value is
> >> less than, equal to, and greater than the value of current node
> >> respectively.
> >>
> >> In ternary search tree map, only the valid content of string is saved.
> >> The trailing null byte and unused bytes after it are not saved. If there
> >> are common prefixes between these strings, the prefix is only saved once.
> >> Compared with other space optimized trie (e.g. HAT-trie, succinct trie),
> >> the advantage of ternary search tree is simple and being writeable.
> >>
> >> Below are diagrams for ternary search map when inserting hello, he,
> >> test and tea into it:
> >>
> >> 1. insert "hello"
> >>
> >>         [ hello ]
> >>
> >> 2. insert "he": need split "hello" into "he" and "llo"
> >>
> >>          [ he ]
> >>             |
> >>             *
> >>             |
> >>          [ llo ]
> >>
> >> 3. insert "test": add it as right child of "he"
> >>
> >>          [ he ]
> >>             |
> >>             *-------x
> >>             |       |
> >>          [ llo ] [ test ]
> >>
> >> 5. insert "tea": split "test" into "te" and "st",
> >>    and insert "a" as left child of "st"
> >>
> >>          [ he ]
> >>             |
> >>      x------*-------x
> >>      |      |       |
> >>   [ ah ] [ llo ] [ te ]
> >>                     |
> >>                     *
> >>                     |
> >>                  [ st ]
> >>                     |
> >>                x----*
> >>                |
> >>              [ a ]
> >>
> >> As showed in above diagrams, the common prefix between "test" and "tea"
> >> is "te" and it only is saved once. Also add benchmarks to compare the
> >> memory usage and lookup performance between ternary search tree and
> >> hash table. When the common prefix is lengthy (~192 bytes) and the
> >> length of suffix is about 64 bytes, there are about 2~3 folds memory
> >> saving compared with hash table. But the memory saving comes at prices:
> >> the lookup performance of tst is about 2~3 slower compared with hash
> >> table. See more benchmark details on patch #2.
> >>
> >> Comments and suggestions are always welcome.
> >>
> > Have you heard and tried qp-trie ([0]) by any chance? It is elegant
> > and simple data structure. By all the available benchmarks it handily
> > beats Red-Black trees in terms of memory usage and performance (though
> > it of course depends on the data set, just like "memory compression"
> > for ternary tree of yours depends on large set of common prefixes).
> > qp-trie based BPF map seems (at least on paper) like a better
> > general-purpose BPF map that is dynamically sized (avoiding current
> > HASHMAP limitations) and stores keys in sorted order (and thus allows
> > meaningful ordered iteration *and*, importantly for longest prefix
> > match tree, allows efficient prefix matches). I did a quick experiment
> > about a month ago trying to replace libbpf's internal use of hashmap
> > with qp-trie for BTF string dedup and it was slightly slower than
> > hashmap (not surprisingly, though, because libbpf over-sizes hashmap
> > to avoid hash collisions and long chains in buckets), but it was still
> > very decent even in that scenario. So I've been mulling the idea of
> > implementing BPF map based on qp-trie elegant design and ideas, but
> > can't find time to do this.
> I have heard about it when check the space efficient of HAT trie [0], because
> qp-trie needs to save the whole string key in the leaf node and its space
> efficiency can not be better than ternary search tree for strings with common
> prefix, so I did not consider about it. But I will do some benchmarks to check
> the lookup performance and space efficiency of qp-trie and tst for string with
> common prefix and strings without much common prefix.
> If qp-trie is better, I think I can take the time to post it as a bpf map if you
> are OK with that.

You can probably always craft a data set where prefix sharing is so
prevalent that space savings are very significant. But I think for a
lot of real-world data it won't be as extreme and qp-trie might be
very comparable (if not more memory-efficient) due to very compact
node layout (which was the point of qp-trie). So I'd be really curious
to see some comparisons. Would be great if you can try both!

>
>
> >
> > This prefix sharing is nice when you have a lot of long common
> > prefixes, but I'm a bit skeptical that as a general-purpose BPF data
> > structure it's going to be that beneficial. 192 bytes of common
> > prefixes seems like a very unusual dataset :)
> Yes. The case with common prefix I known is full file path.
> > More specifically about TST implementation in your paches. One global
> > per-map lock I think is a very big downside. We have LPM trie which is
> > very slow in big part due to global lock. It might be possible to
> > design more granular schema for TST, but this whole in-place splitting
> > logic makes this harder. I think qp-trie can be locked in a granular
> > fashion much more easily by having a "hand over hand" locking: lock
> > parent, find child, lock child, unlock parent, move into child node.
> > Something like that would be more scalable overall, especially if the
> > access pattern is not focused on a narrow set of nodes.
> Yes. The global lock is a problem but the splitting is not in-place. I will try
> to figure out whether the lock can be more scalable after the benchmark test
> between qp-trie and tst.

Great, looking forward!

>
> Regards,
> Tao
>
> [0]: https://github.com/Tessil/hat-trie
> >
> > Anyways, I love data structures and this one is an interesting idea.
> > But just my few cents of "production-readiness" for general-purpose
> > data structures for BPF.
> >
> >   [0] https://dotat.at/prog/qp/README.html
> >
> >> Regards,
> >> Tao
> >>
> >> [1]: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/CAADnVQJUJp3YBcpESwR3Q1U6GS1mBM=Vp-qYuQX7eZOaoLjdUA@mail.gmail.com/
> >>
> >> Hou Tao (2):
> >>   bpf: Introduce ternary search tree for string key
> >>   selftests/bpf: add benchmark for ternary search tree map
> >>
> >>  include/linux/bpf_types.h                     |   1 +
> >>  include/uapi/linux/bpf.h                      |   1 +
> >>  kernel/bpf/Makefile                           |   1 +
> >>  kernel/bpf/bpf_tst.c                          | 411 +++++++++++++++++
> >>  tools/include/uapi/linux/bpf.h                |   1 +
> >>  tools/testing/selftests/bpf/Makefile          |   5 +-
> >>  tools/testing/selftests/bpf/bench.c           |   6 +
> >>  .../selftests/bpf/benchs/bench_tst_map.c      | 415 ++++++++++++++++++
> >>  .../selftests/bpf/benchs/run_bench_tst.sh     |  54 +++
> >>  tools/testing/selftests/bpf/progs/tst_bench.c |  70 +++
> >>  10 files changed, 964 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> >>  create mode 100644 kernel/bpf/bpf_tst.c
> >>  create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/bpf/benchs/bench_tst_map.c
> >>  create mode 100755 tools/testing/selftests/bpf/benchs/run_bench_tst.sh
> >>  create mode 100644 tools/testing/selftests/bpf/progs/tst_bench.c
> >>
> >> --
> >> 2.31.1
> >>
> > .
>

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