Improving Parser Performance using SSE Instructions (in case of PicoHTTPParser)

PicoHTTPParser is a tiny but very fast HTTP parser library known for its use by many Perl applications. In the slides I used last month, I suggested it could be even faster if SIMD instructions were used. Now the feature is available thanks to @herumi.

The library now uses the PCMPESTRI instruction which is part of SSE 4.2, running 68% to 90% faster.

Benchmark	clang -O3	clang -O3 -msse4.2	Improvement
bench.c	2,181,025	4,140,787	+90%
fukamachi.c	3,213,440	5,400,064	+68%

PCMPxSTRx is a SIMD instruction that can be used for parsing text. In _SIDD_CMP_RANGES mode, it checks at most 16 bytes at once, if each byte is within given set of ranges. Herumi and I have created a wrapper function for the instruction named findchar_fast that iterates though every 16 bytes of a given buffer to find the first occurrence of a byte within a set of given ranges.

And the function is merged neatly into the parser; the code below at first uses the SIMD function to look for a control character (the match condition is defined as ranges1), then falls back to the non-SIMD code to handling up to 15 remaining characters (that cannot be processed by the SIMD function due to out-of-bounds access).

#ifdef __SSE4_2__
  static const char ranges1[] =
    "\0\010"
    /* allow HT */
    "\012\037"
    /* allow SP and up to but not including DEL */
    "\177\177"
    /* allow chars w. MSB set */
    ;
  int found;
  buf = findchar_fast(buf, buf_end,
                      ranges1, sizeof(ranges1) - 1,
                      &found);
  if (found)
    goto FOUND_CTL;
#endif
  /* code that handles the input byte-by-byte */

To summarize, PCMPxSTRx is an excellent instruction for performance that can be cleanly integrated into existing parsers (tokenizers). Hopefully we will see performance improvements in various parsers in the future through the use of the instruction.

This blog post has been written as part of the H2O Advent Calendar.