Java, How Fast Can You Parse 1 Billion Rows of Weather Data? • Roy van Rijn • GOTO 2024

[@actorenEU]

In 1975, at the University of Delft, my professor and I collaboratively developed an assembler and interpreter for the computer practicum. We had to run this on an IBM mainframe, using a higher-level language. To make it functional, we had to employ extensive masking and shifting operations. I vividly remember the complex logical intricacies we had to navigate to get it all working correctly. From this hands-on experience, I truly admire your work and the effort it takes to even get it working.

[@TimBradleyFromOz]

From 4 minutes 49 seconds 679 milliseconds >>> to >>> 1 second 535 miliseconds? Wow! Great talk, thanks!

[@serrrsch]

I've followed the competition on Twitter and GitHub but this talk is just a Gem in how it is being told. Big up for the presentation/slides skills!

[@GeorgeTsiros]

29:16 when you've spent a lot of time coding on a device with no pipelining, no SIMD, no cache, no OOE, no hardware multiplication, no hardware float operations, not even indirect memory access, 4 MHz and 10 clock cycles to read _half_ a byte, you are basically forced to learn a lot of bit-twiddling

[@LtdJorge]

If you optimize for specific arches, you can do the SIMD lookup with less instructions and much wider. For example, I’m using the memchr Rust crate by the genius BurntSushi, and specifically the AVX2 implementation. It does loops of 4 sequential comparisons with 256bit registers. The SIMD part is just 2 instructions.

[@TechTalksWeekly]

This is a brilliant talk and it's been featured in the last issue of Tech Talks Weekly newsletter 🎉 Congrats Roy!

[@Syntax753]

Kudos for mentioning Advent of Code! And yeah, most people can parse 1 Billion rows of weather data between every blink (and more if using strong Java)

[@juveraey]

even my low brain can understand what you said. great talk thank you Roy van Rijn

[@aronhegedus]

The --worker trick is interesting! Learned some cool things in this one

[@djchrisi]

The view count gives testamony what a fun challenge that was.

[@thesilentnerd4618]

Loved every second. ❤

[@robchr]

Wizard level optimizations

[@jpphoton]

very well done. one of the best imho. that's how we do it.

[@RumberoEuropeo]

These tricks are great for graph analytics too!

[@eduardopalhares3526]

Really Great talk, thanks for sharing this knowledge

[@aronhegedus]

I'm still quote confused as to how you can read in 15Gb of text in

[@Nashadelicable]

This was so much fun watching

[@ericm97]

What a journey. Lovely talk 🙂

[@wsollers1]

This was an amazing talk

[@chauchau0825]

This is gold

[@saschazapf5232]

Hi Roy, remember good old Redcode Days,? Hope u doing well. Nice topic btw

[@royvanrijn]

@@saschazapf5232 of course; we should revisit that 🙌🏼

[@saschazapf5232]

@@royvanrijn Revisit would not the right word for this. I really think quite often about cw. Two years ago i done some research for a better amount of rounds for the hill because of the score deviation on differents seed at 200 Rounds. After that i had some idea about another approach for optimzing paper. But i had not enough time , that time. Now i'm tring to polish up my Java Skills and consumed some video's. Imagine my face when i saw ur face and name on my yt landing page. I saw a picture of u once, literally 15 years ago but i instantly know this was u.

[@geoffxander7970]

When a software engineer stumbles upon the dark arts of real computer science... The only thing that comes to mind not talked about was AVX2 or SSE4.x (I don't know if they're supported natively in Java).

[@NostraDavid2]

I didn't see CompSci though? No math theorems, etc. Just pure engineering.

[@phpngpl]

💪💪💪GraalVM

[@Abhigyan103]

How can I learn Java, which is this advanced, every course just teaches object oriented programming

[@khuntasaurus88]

@@Abhigyan103 by writing code. Just. Write. Code. Pick an idea and implement it. Then benchmark it and try to optimize it

[@GeorgeTsiros]

from what I suspect, it is not _Java_ that you want to learn, but low level programming. Or, just, you know, _programming_

[@krystianlaskowski]

Challenge and Setup: The speaker participated in the "1 billion row challenge" using vanilla Java with no libraries. The task was to parse a file with 1 billion rows, each containing a city name and temperature, and compute the minimum, maximum, and average temperature for each city. Initial Optimization: Initial baseline implementation took about 5 minutes to parse the file. By optimizing to use multiple threads and a concurrent map, the runtime was reduced to 2 minutes. Advanced Techniques: Further improvements included using memory-mapped files and unsafe operations to bypass boundary checks for faster access. Leveraged Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) techniques to process multiple bytes simultaneously, significantly speeding up parsing. Branchless Programming: Implemented branchless programming to avoid CPU pipeline stalls, using bitwise operations for conditions and calculations. Avoided string allocations by working directly with raw memory and integer values. Final Optimizations: Used forward probing for efficient hash map operations, eliminating collisions. Adopted a worker thread setup to handle file unmapping separately, further reducing processing time. Achieved a final runtime of 23 seconds using these combined optimizations and Java's advanced features.

[@akshaysom]

For my little brain this is sorcery 😂

[@AlLiberali]

The baseline impl takes just 5 minutes to process _1 billion_ lines. I'd say the hardware is optimised enough; No need for such hacks in production code

[@androth1502]

native compilation... is it really java anymore?

[@sjzara]

@@androth1502 of course.

[@zombi1034]

Java does native compilation anyway using it's JIT (just in time compiler). The difference with GraalVM is that you do the compilation ahead of time. That's why for long running Java programs there is not really a big performance difference between native image and your regular Java program. Because all hot code (code that gets executed regularly) will get compiled to native code anyway. The Java VM just takes a bit of time to warmup.

[@sjzara]

@@zombi1034 That's not really how it works. Runtime compilation can produce far better performance for long-running programs than ahead of time. Hot code is not just compiled to native code - the compilation is speculative and can be re-done if circumstances chance. There can be things like inlining of method calls that are possible speculatively but not ahead of time.

[@androth1502]

@@zombi1034 ah. ok. i thought one did native compilation and the other to JVM. if they are both JVM then my point was irrelevant.

[@meryplays8952]

ok, how about Golang?

[@1Eagler]

If y need Java to go really fast, change it to C

[@-_James_-]

I'm glad that constant panning left to right of the camera isn't distracting. Otherwise I might have got irritated and not bothered watching the video. Oh wait...

[@Tony-dp1rl]

Any language that cannot do this entirely I/O limited by the reading of the billion rows from disk in parallel, should be shamed. This would run at I/O speed in JavaScript, Java, C#, Python, Turbo Pascal,, even LUA could do this. :)

[@LtdJorge]

The results are gathered with the file on a tmpfs, so no, most languages wouldn’t run this at I/O (memory) speed.

[@nightking4615]

Using memory maps is cheating!

[@LtdJorge]

The contest results were taken by putting the file in a tmpfs, so mmapping is basically free.

[@TehGettinq]

@@LtdJorge how is it free? you still need to pay for a cpy and for page faults, no?

[@Knirin]

@@TehGettinqHeavy internal optimizations in the Linux tmpfs kernel driver. Simplifying things the tmpfs driver stores files directly in the read cache memory area and uses the virtual memory subsystem for access protection. Yes page faults happen but they aren’t much slower than jumping to another function outside of the currently loaded page compared to a full seek to disk.

[@TehGettinq]

@@Knirin would you have a source? Want to read about it

[@Knirin]

@@TehGettinq A single easy to read one, no. I suggest searching for the differences between “initrd” and “initramfs”. An LWN article about those is where I became aware of the original differences. Tmpfs has had more optimizations since then.

[@CenturionDobrius]

Amazing presentation, thanks a lot for sharing ❤