Performance Tuning¶

Guidelines for optimizing milk pipeline throughput and latency, covering OS-level configuration, process scheduling, memory layout, and GPU acceleration.

See also: Process Info · Streams · FPS · Debugging · FAQ · Code-Level Optimization Rules · Code Assist Tools

1. Measuring Performance¶

1.1. Loop Frequency¶

Use milk-procinfo-list to monitor the Hz column for each compute unit. This is the most direct measure of pipeline throughput.

1.2. Semaphore Latency¶

Benchmark the fundamental IPC latency:

$ milk-semloopspeed 10000

Typical values on modern hardware:

• x86_64 (bare metal): 200–500 kHz
• ARM (embedded): 50–150 kHz
• VM / container: 30–100 kHz (overhead from virtualization)

1.3. Stream Timing¶

Use milk-streamCTRL to observe per-stream frame rates and detect bottlenecks in the pipeline.

2. CPU Pinning¶

Bind compute-critical processes to dedicated CPU cores to avoid context-switch overhead and cache thrashing.

2.1. Using taskset¶

# Pin to core 4
$ taskset -c 4 milk-fpsexec-mymodule fpsinit

# Pin to cores 4-7
$ taskset -c 4-7 milk-fpsexec-mymodule fpsinit

2.2. Kernel Isolation (isolcpus)¶

For maximum determinism, isolate cores from the Linux scheduler at boot time:

# Add to kernel command line (GRUB)
isolcpus=4,5,6,7

Then only explicitly pinned processes will run on those cores.

3. Real-Time Scheduling¶

3.1. SCHED_FIFO¶

For latency-critical loops, elevate the scheduling policy:

$ sudo chrt -f 49 milk-fpsexec-mymodule fpsinit

Priority range: 1 (lowest) to 99 (highest). Avoid 99 which is reserved for kernel threads.

3.2. Permissions¶

To allow non-root real-time scheduling:

# /etc/security/limits.d/milk.conf
@realtime  -  rtprio  95
@realtime  -  memlock unlimited

Add users to the realtime group.

4. Shared Memory Configuration¶

4.1. tmpfs Size¶

By default, /dev/shm may be limited to 50% of RAM. For large stream buffers, increase it:

# Temporary
$ sudo mount -o remount,size=16G /dev/shm

# Permanent: add to /etc/fstab
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults,size=16G 0 0

4.2. Huge Pages¶

For very large streams, huge pages reduce TLB misses:

# Allocate 1024 huge pages (2 MB each = 2 GB)
$ echo 1024 | sudo tee \
    /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages

To enable huge pages for ImageStreamIO shared memory streams ≥ 2 MB:

$ export MILK_SHM_HUGETLB=1

When set, ImageStreamIO_createIm_gpu() uses MAP_HUGETLB for its mmap() call. If huge pages are unavailable, it falls back to normal pages automatically.

5. GPU Acceleration (CUDA)¶

5.1. Build with CUDA¶

$ cmake .. -DUSE_CUDA=ON \
    -DCUDA_TOOLKIT_ROOT_DIR=/usr/local/cuda
$ make -j$(nproc)

5.2. GPU Memory Pinning¶

Use cudaHostRegister() to pin shared memory buffers for zero-copy GPU access. This is handled automatically by GPU-enabled modules (e.g., linalgebra with cuBLAS).

5.3. Multi-GPU¶

Set the GPU device before launching:

$ CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=1 milk-fpsexec-gpumodule fpsinit

6. Network Tuning (for Valkey sync)¶

When using milk-fps-valkey across hosts, minimize network latency:

# Disable Nagle's algorithm
$ sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_nodelay=1

# Increase socket buffer sizes
$ sysctl -w net.core.rmem_max=16777216
$ sysctl -w net.core.wmem_max=16777216

See also: Valkey Integration

7. Quick Checklist¶

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