frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Understanding the Go Scheduler

https://nghiant3223.github.io/2025/04/15/go-scheduler.html
180•gnabgib•7mo ago

Comments

90s_dev•7mo ago
I heard that the scheduler is a huge obstacle to many potential optimizations, is that true?
NAHWheatCracker•7mo ago
In some ways, yes. If you want to optimize at that level you ought to use another language.

I'm not a low level optimization guy, but I've had occasions where I wanted control over which threads my goroutines are running on or prioritizing important goroutines. It's a trade off for making things less complex, which is standard for Go.

I suppose there's always hope that the Go developers can change things.

silisili•7mo ago
You can kinda work around this though. runtime package has a LockOSThread that pins a goroutine to its current thread and prevents others from using it.

If you model it in a way where you have one goroutine per os thread that receives and does work, it gets you close. But in many cases that means rearching the entire code base, as it's not a style I typically reach for.

naikrovek•7mo ago
That sounds a lot like just using another language.
silisili•7mo ago
It's really not that bad. If you have a codebase in Go you can speed up, it's fine.

That said, if you're greenfielding and see this as a limitation to begin with, picking another language is probably the right way.

jerf•7mo ago
If you need it here or there, no. I've got a use case where I need a single locked thread for a particular syscall's functionality. It's not like it leaks out into the rest of the program and everything else has to change to accomodate it.

If you need it pervasively, Go may not be the correct choice. Then again, the list of languages that is not a correct choice in that case is quite long. That's a minority case. An important one, but a minority one.

jasonthorsness•7mo ago
It's always a sign of good design when something as complex as the scheduler described "just works" with the simple abstraction of the goroutine. What a great article.

"1/61 of the time, check the global run queue." Stuff like this is a little odd; I would have thought this would be a variable dependent on the number of physical cores.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF•7mo ago
That's so funny. I just saw `61` in the Tokio code with a comment "copied this from Go"
__turbobrew__•7mo ago
Make sure you set GOMAXPROCS when the runtime is cgroup limited.

I once profiled a slow go program running on a node with 168 cores, but cpu.max was 2 cores for the cgroup. The runtime defaults to set GOMAXPROCS to the number of visible cores which was 168 in this case. Over half the runtime was the scheduler bouncing goroutines between 168 processes despite cpu.max being 2 CPU.

The JRE is smart enough to figure out if it is running in a resource limited cgroup and make sane decisions based upon that, but golang has no such thing.

xyzzy_plugh•7mo ago
Relevant proposal to make GOMAXPROCS cgroup-aware: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/73193
robinhoodexe•7mo ago
Looks like it was just merged btw.
yencabulator•7mo ago
This should be automatic these days (for the basic scenarios).

https://github.com/golang/go/blob/a1a151496503cafa5e4c672e0e...

jasonthorsness•7mo ago
uh isn't that change 3 hours old?
yencabulator•7mo ago
Oh heh yes it is. I just remembered the original discussion from 2019 (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/33803) and grepped the source tree for cgroup to see if that got done or not, but didn't check when it got done.

As said in 2019, import https://github.com/uber-go/automaxprocs to get the functionality ASAP.

jasonthorsness•7mo ago
super-weird coincidence but welcome, I have been waiting for this for a long time!
williamdclt•7mo ago
I honestly can’t count on my fingers and toes how many times something very precisely relevant to me was brought up or sorted out hours-to-days before I looked it up. And more often than once, by people I personally knew!

Always a weird feeling, it’s a small world

formerly_proven•7mo ago
This is probably going to save quadrillions of CPU cycles by making an untold number of deployed Go applications a bit more CPU efficient. Since Go is the "lingua franca" of containers, many ops people assume the Go runtime is container-aware - it's not (well not in any released version, yet).

If they'd now also make the GC respect memory cgroup limits (i.e. automatic GOMEMLIMIT), we'd probably be freeing up a couple petabytes of memory across the globe.

Java has been doing these things for a while, even OpenJDK 8 has had those patches since probably before covid.

mappu•7mo ago
GOMEMLIMIT is not as easy, you may have other processes in the same container/cgroup also using memory.
kunley•7mo ago
As long as I admit respecting cgroup's setting is a good thing, I am not sure it's really quadrillions.

Or is it? Need calculations

formerly_proven•7mo ago
I would've expected it to be either way too much or way too little, but after doing the math it could be sorta in the right ballpark, at least cosmically speaking.

Let's go with three quadrillion (which is apparently 10^15), let's assume a server CPU does 3 GHz (10^9), that's 10^6, a day is about 100k seconds, so ~ten days. But of course we're only saving cycles. I've seen throughput increase by about 50% when setting GOMAXPROCS on bigger machines, but in most of those cases we're looking at containers with fractional cores. On the other hand, there are many containers. So...

kunley•7mo ago
Nice reasoning, thanks.

Hey, but what did you have in mind with regard to bigger machines? I think we're talking here about lowering GOMAXPROCS to have in effect less context switching of the OS threads. While it can bring some good result, a gut feeling is that it'd be hardly 50% faster overall, is your scenario the same then?

01HNNWZ0MV43FF•7mo ago
Trying to see if Rust and Tokio have the same problem. I don't know enough about cgroups to be sure. Tokio at this line [1] ends up delegating to `std::thread::available_parallelism` [2] which says

> It may overcount the amount of parallelism available when limited by a process-wide affinity mask or cgroup quotas and sched_getaffinity() or cgroup fs can’t be queried, e.g. due to sandboxing.

[1] https://docs.rs/tokio/1.45.0/src/tokio/loom/std/mod.rs.html#...

[2] https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/thread/fn.available_par...

nvarsj•7mo ago
Probably not?

The fundamental issue comes down to background GC and CPU quotas in cgroups.

If your number of worker threads is too high, GC will eat up all the quota.

kortex•7mo ago
Fantastic writeup! Visualizations are great, the writeup is thorough but readable.
weiwenhao•7mo ago
Your write-up is so detailed that I even feel like I could implement a complete golang scheduler myself
davidw•7mo ago
I'd be interested in seeing a comparison of this and the BEAM/Erlang/Elixir scheduler by someone paying attention to the details.

Show HN: Terminal UI for AWS

https://github.com/huseyinbabal/taws
205•huseyinbabal•7h ago•97 comments

Why does a least squares fit appear to have a bias when applied to simple data?

https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/674129/why-does-a-linear-least-squares-fit-appear-to-ha...
164•azeemba•7h ago•44 comments

Lessons from 14 Years at Google

https://addyosmani.com/blog/21-lessons/
888•cdrnsf•12h ago•414 comments

During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

https://sparkbox.com/foundry/helene_and_mobile_web_performance
27•CqtGLRGcukpy•55m ago•14 comments

The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

https://candost.blog/the-unbearable-joy-of-sitting-alone-in-a-cafe/
464•mooreds•12h ago•284 comments

The Showa Hundred Year Problem

https://www.dampfkraft.com/showa-100.html
23•polm23•4d ago•5 comments

Street Fighter II, the World Warrier (2021)

https://fabiensanglard.net/sf2_warrier/
326•birdculture•13h ago•56 comments

Linear Address Spaces: Unsafe at any speed (2022)

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3534854
124•nithssh•4d ago•85 comments

The year of the 3D printed miniature and other lies we tell ourselves

https://matduggan.com/the-year-of-the-3d-printed-miniature-and-other-lies-we-tell-ourselves/
110•sagacity•6d ago•73 comments

Ripple, a puzzle game about 2nd and 3rd order effects

https://ripplegame.app/
89•mooreds•9h ago•20 comments

Millennium Challenge: A corrupted military exercise and its legacy (2015)

https://warontherocks.com/2015/11/millennium-challenge-the-real-story-of-a-corrupted-military-exe...
25•lifeisstillgood•3h ago•19 comments

Eurostar AI vulnerability: When a chatbot goes off the rails

https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/eurostar-ai-vulnerability-when-a-chatbot-goes-off-t...
100•speckx•6h ago•29 comments

Six Harmless Bugs Lead to Remote Code Execution

https://mehmetince.net/the-story-of-a-perfect-exploit-chain-six-bugs-that-looked-harmless-until-t...
29•ozirus•3d ago•1 comments

Show HN: An interactive guide to how browsers work

https://howbrowserswork.com/
182•krasun•12h ago•29 comments

Web development is fun again

https://ma.ttias.be/web-development-is-fun-again/
309•Mojah•12h ago•395 comments

Server-rendered multiplayer games with Lua (no client code)

https://cleoselene.com/
63•brunovcosta•7h ago•39 comments

Agentic Patterns

https://github.com/nibzard/awesome-agentic-patterns
81•PretzelFisch•8h ago•7 comments

The great shift of English prose

https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/english-prose-has-become-much-easier
37•dsubburam•4d ago•25 comments

Show HN: Hover – IDE style hover documentation on any webpage

https://github.com/Sampsoon/hover
40•sampsonj•8h ago•18 comments

Moiré Explorer

https://play.ertdfgcvb.xyz/#/src/demos/moire_explorer
136•Luc•14h ago•17 comments

Anti-aging injection regrows knee cartilage and prevents arthritis

https://scitechdaily.com/anti-aging-injection-regrows-knee-cartilage-and-prevents-arthritis/
213•nis0s•12h ago•78 comments

Show HN: An LLM-Powered PCB Schematic Checker (Major Update)

https://traceformer.io/
33•wafflesfreak•5h ago•15 comments

Bison return to Illinois' Kane County after 200 years

https://phys.org/news/2025-12-bison-illinois-kane-county-years.html
125•bikenaga•5d ago•38 comments

FreeBSD Home NAS, part 3: WireGuard VPN, routing, and Linux peers

https://rtfm.co.ua/en/freebsd-home-nas-part-3-wireguard-vpn-linux-peer-and-routing/
148•todsacerdoti•15h ago•8 comments

Using Hinge as a Command and Control Server

https://mattwie.se/hinge-command-control-c2
95•mattwiese•13h ago•46 comments

Trellis AI (YC W24) is hiring engineers to build AI agents for healthcare access

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trellis-ai/jobs/ngvfeaq-member-of-technical-staff-full-time
1•macklinkachorn•10h ago

How I archived 10 years of memories using Spotify

https://notes.xdavidhu.me/notes/how-i-archived-10-years-of-memories-using-spotify
89•xdavidhu•12h ago•40 comments

Claude Code On-the-Go

https://granda.org/en/2026/01/02/claude-code-on-the-go/
229•todsacerdoti•7h ago•160 comments

Stop Forwarding Errors, Start Designing Them

https://fast.github.io/blog/stop-forwarding-errors-start-designing-them/
80•andylokandy•8h ago•47 comments

Show HN: Quantum Tunnel

https://chuanqisun.github.io/quantum-tunnel/
23•osmoscraft•4h ago•11 comments