WordCount in Elixir

Half of year ago, Chris Penner had posted Beating C With 80 Lines Of Haskell: Wc. The preface states:

The challenge is to build a faster clone of the hand-optimized C implementation of the wc utility in our favourite high-level garbage-collected runtime-based language: Haskell! Sounds simple enough right?

Down the road Chris went through ByteStrings implementation, Monoids, Inlined Monoids, and, finally came to multicore version of the above that could slightly beat pure C code in execution time on four cores.

Several days ago, there was a related article posted on habr (Russian only at the moment, sorry.) The author proved the ability to build an idiomatic Haskell version in 20 (twenty) lines of code that is almost ten times faster than idiomatic C implementation.

Meanwhile I advocate to use Haskell (actually, Idris for its dependent types) and Coq to indeed prove the critical concepts in our codebase only; the new production code is still coming 100% in Elixir/Erlang/OTP for its fault tolerance. I wanted to make sure I am not shitting my pants here, so I decided to check how can we do with Idiomatic Elixir for the very same task.

Below you’ll see some tricks I used to speed up the execution. I am a grown man and I don’t believe in Tooth fairy anymore, so I was far from the hope that Elixir might actually beat languages compiled into a native machine code. I just wanted to make sure we didn’t fall behind at the finish line by a lap.

I am to use the very same test file as @0xd34df00d used in his experiments. Grab it and glue it with itself ten times.

% for i in `seq 1 10`; cat part.txt >> test.txt
% du -sh test.txt
1.8G    test.txt

On my machine (8 cores / 16G) it is handled by wc in 10 seconds approx.

time LANG=C LC_ALL=C wc data/test.txt 
  15000000   44774631 1871822210 data/test.txt
LANG=C LC_ALL=C wc data/test.txt  9,69s user 0,36s system 99% cpu 10,048 total

Let’s see how far behind we’d be with OTP.

Naïve. Too Naïve Approach

I started with a most naïve recursive implementation, parsing the stream symbol by a symbol.

@acc %{bc: 0, wc: 1, lc: 0, ns?: 1}

@type acc :: %{
        bc: non_neg_integer(),
        wc: non_neg_integer(),
        lc: non_neg_integer(),
        ns?: 0 | 1
      }

@spec parse(<<_::_*8>>, acc()) :: acc()
def parse("", acc), do: acc

def parse(
      <<?\n, rest::binary>>,
      %{bc: bc, wc: wc, lc: lc, ns?: ns}
    ),
    do: parse(rest, %{bc: bc + 1, wc: wc + ns, lc: lc + 1, ns?: 0})

def parse(
      <<?\s, rest::binary>>,
      %{bc: bc, wc: wc, lc: lc, ns?: ns}
    ),
    do: parse(rest, %{bc: bc + 1, wc: wc + ns, lc: lc, ns?: 0})

def parse(<<_, rest::binary>>, acc),
  do: parse(rest, %{acc | bc: acc.bc + 1, ns?: 1})

This function is fed from either greedy File.read!/1, or lazy File.stream!/3 in the following way.

@spec lazy(binary) :: acc()actually
def lazy(file),
  do: file |> File.stream!() |> Enum.reduce(@acc, &parse/2)

@spec greedy(binary) :: acc()
def greedy(file),
  do: file |> File.read!() |> parse(@acc)

As one might expect, the results are too disappointing. I even did not run it on the whole file; I ran it on one tenth part, where wc had done for less than a second, and our naïve implementaion did more than ten times worse (results below are in μs.)

iex|1 ▶ :timer.tc fn -> Wc.lazy "data/part.txt" end
#⇒ {16_737094, %{bc: 185682221, lc: 1500000, ns?: 1, wc: 4477464}}
iex|2 ▶ :timer.tc fn -> Wc.greedy "data/part.txt" end
#⇒ {13_659356, %{bc: 187182221, lc: 1500000, ns?: 1, wc: 4477464}}

Shall we throw our toolchain away and migrate to Haskell tomorrow? Not yet.

Pattern Match Wisely

What if we could count non-empty bytes by chunks? Sure, good question. Let’s generate functions to pattern match next ?\s or ?\n as far from the current point as we can. Looking ahead, I should say that looking ahead way too far makes the code run slower, possibly because of the overhead on the necessity to handle too many functions for no reason (even Finnish words are rarely longer than forty characters.)

@prehandle 42
@sink @prehandle + 1

@spec parse(<<_::_*8>>, acc()) :: acc()

Enum.each(0..@prehandle, fn i ->
  def parse(
        <<_::binary-size(unquote(i)), ?\n, rest::binary>>,
        %{bc: bc, wc: wc, lc: lc, ns?: ns}
      ),
      do: parse(rest, acc!(unquote(i), bc, wc, lc + 1, ns))

  def parse(
        <<_::binary-size(unquote(i)), ?\s, rest::binary>>,
        %{bc: bc, wc: wc, lc: lc, ns?: ns}
      ),
      do: parse(rest, acc!(unquote(i), bc, wc, lc, ns))
end)

def parse(<<_::binary-size(@sink), rest::binary>>, acc),
  do: parse(rest, %{acc | bc: acc.bc + @sink, ns?: 1})

Enum.each(@prehandle..0, fn i ->
  def parse(<<_::binary-size(unquote(i))>>, acc),
    do: %{acc | bc: acc.bc + unquote(i), ns?: 1}
end)

acc! above is a syntax sugar macro that shortens this snippet, one might see it in the whole code listing below.

What the heck is happening above and how it it a promised Idiomatic Elixir? Well, it is. During a compilation time, we generate 130 different clauses (43 for matching the next EOL, the same amount to match the next space, handles for the tail and the handle for the list of Welsh and New Zealand’s toponyms

Let’s see how it performs.

iex|1 ▶ :timer.tc fn -> Wc.greedy "data/part.txt" end      
#⇒ {2_569929, %{bc: 187182221, lc: 1500000, ns?: 1, wc: 4477464}}
iex|1 ▶ :timer.tc fn -> Wc.lazy "data/part.txt" end  
#⇒ {6_616190, %{bc: 185682221, lc: 1500000, ns?: 1, wc: 4477464}}

Well, much better, but it’s still six times longer than the native wc for a lazy version (and promising 2.5 times only worse for the greedy load.)

Here one could stop, saying I’d trade being 2.5 times slower for the fault tolerance and hot uploads, but we are here not for that. When I started this journey I promised myself I won’t cheat. All that creepy stuff, like NIFs written in Rust as it is fashionable nowadays. Pure Elixir code only, no spices. But hey, Erlang/OTP brings concurrency for free, so we might probably use it for free. Unless we need to write some sophisticated monoidal code (that I cannot write anyway) as Chris did in his trip. Luckily enough, everything is already there; welcome Flow.

Use More Than 12% Of What We Have Paid For

The good news is literally no code changes are needed in our parsing code. There is a new dependency in mix.exs (I also extended it with escript generation for the face-to-face test afterward.)

def project do
  [
    app: :wc,
    version: "0.1.0",
    elixir: "~> 1.9",
    start_permanent: Mix.env() == :prod,

    escript: [main_module: Wc.Main],
    deps: [{:flow, "~> 1.0"}]
  ]
end

Now we need to implement a new function in the main module.

@chunk 1_000_000

@spec flowy(binary()) :: acc()
def flowy(file) do
  file
  |> File.stream!([], @chunk)
  |> Flow.from_enumerable()
  |> Flow.partition()
  |> Flow.reduce(fn -> @acc end, &parse/2)
  |> Enum.to_list()
end

I have heuristically (by randomly picking different numbers) discovered, than the optimal chunk would be somewhat around several megabytes, so I choosed chunks of the size 1M. The results differ insignificantly.

Let’s test it!

iex|1 ▶ :timer.tc fn -> Wc.flowy "data/part.txt" end
#⇒ {0_752568, %{bc: 187182221, lc: 1500000, ns?: 1, wc: 4477464}}
iex|2 ▶ :timer.tc fn -> Wc.flowy "data/test.txt" end
#⇒ {7_815592, %{bc: 1871822210, lc: 15000000, ns?: 1, wc: 44774631}}

Wow. The result is as impressive that I even ran it for the whole 1.8G file. Yes, we indeed were faster than wc on that contrived, grown in hothouse, showing nothing and proving nothing, example. Save for now we are more or less sure Elixir/OTP is fast enough for our purposes, even compared to compiled into native code languages. I also ran mix escript.build and finally clean-compared results in the same race.

time LANG=C LC_ALL=C wc data/test.txt
  15000000   44774631 1871822210 data/test.txt
LANG=C LC_ALL=C wc data/test.txt  9,71s user 0,39s system 99% cpu 10,104 total

time ./wc data/test.txt
	15000000	44774631	1871822210	data/test.txt
./wc data/test.txt  41,72s user 2,31s system 706% cpu 6,355 total

Almost twice as fast in total.

Below is the whole code (including main implementation for escript) in a case one would want to experiment with.

defmodule Wc do
  @acc %{bc: 0, wc: 1, lc: 0, ns?: 1}
  @prehandle 42
  @sink @prehandle + 1
  @chunk 1_000_000

  @type acc :: %{
          bc: non_neg_integer(),
          wc: non_neg_integer(),
          lc: non_neg_integer(),
          ns?: 0 | 1
        }

  @spec lazy(binary) :: acc()
  def lazy(file),
    do: file |> File.stream!() |> Enum.reduce(@acc, &parse/2)

  @spec greedy(binary) :: acc()
  def greedy(file),
    do: file |> File.read!() |> parse(@acc)

  @spec flowy(binary) :: acc()
  def flowy(file) do
    kw =
      file
      |> File.stream!([], @chunk)
      |> Flow.from_enumerable()
      |> Flow.partition()
      |> Flow.reduce(fn -> @acc end, &parse/2)
      |> Enum.to_list()

    m =
      [:bc, :lc, :wc, :ns?]
      |> Enum.into(%{}, &{&1, Keyword.get_values(kw, &1) |> Enum.sum()})

    m
    |> Map.update!(:wc, &(&1 + 1 - m.ns?))
    |> Map.put(:ns?, 1)
  end

  defmacrop ns!(0, ns), do: ns
  defmacrop ns!(_, _), do: 1

  defmacro acc!(i, bc, wc, lc, ns) do
    quote do
      %{
        bc: unquote(bc) + unquote(i) + 1,
        wc: unquote(wc) + unquote(ns),
        lc: unquote(lc),
        ns?: ns!(unquote(i), unquote(ns))
      }
    end
  end

  @spec parse(<<_::_*8>>, acc()) :: acc()

  Enum.each(0..@prehandle, fn i ->
    def parse(
          <<_::binary-size(unquote(i)), ?\n, rest::binary>>,
          %{bc: bc, wc: wc, lc: lc, ns?: ns}
        ),
        do: parse(rest, acc!(unquote(i), bc, wc, lc + 1, ns))

    def parse(
          <<_::binary-size(unquote(i)), ?\s, rest::binary>>,
          %{bc: bc, wc: wc, lc: lc, ns?: ns}
        ),
        do: parse(rest, acc!(unquote(i), bc, wc, lc, ns))
  end)

  def parse(<<_::binary-size(@sink), rest::binary>>, acc),
    do: parse(rest, %{acc | bc: acc.bc + @sink, ns?: 1})

  Enum.each(@prehandle..0, fn i ->
    def parse(<<_::binary-size(unquote(i))>>, acc),
      do: %{acc | bc: acc.bc + unquote(i), ns?: 1}
  end)

  defmodule Main do
    defdelegate lazy(file), to: Wc
    defdelegate greedy(file), to: Wc
    defdelegate flowy(file), to: Wc

    @spec main([binary()]) :: any
    def main([]), do: IO.inspect("Usage: wc file _or_ wc method file")
    def main([file]), do: main(["flowy", file])

    def main([m, file]) do
      %{bc: bc, wc: wc, lc: lc} = apply(Wc, String.to_existing_atom(m), [file])

      ["", lc, wc, bc, file]
      |> Enum.join(<<?\t>>)
      |> IO.puts()
    end
  end
end

Happy wordcounting!

WordCount in Elixir elixir 82 erlang 21

Naïve. Too Naïve Approach

Pattern Match Wisely

Use More Than 12% Of What We Have Paid For

WordCount in Elixir

elixir 82

erlang 21