News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by withinboredom on Friday March 13, 2026 @03:55AM (#47361711)
My biggest issue with go is it’s incredibly unfair scheduler. No matter what load you have, P99 and especially P99.9 latency will be higher than any other language. The way that it steals work guarantees that requests “in the middle” will be served last.

It’s a problem that only go can solve, but that means giving up some of your speed that are currently handled immediately that shouldn’t be. So overall latency will go up and P99 will drop precipitously. Thus, they’ll probably never fix it.

If you have a system that requires predictable latency, go is not the right language for it.

Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by red_admiral on Friday March 13, 2026 @03:58AM (#47361719)
> If you have a system that requires predictable latency, go is not the right language for it.

I presume that's by design, to trade off against other things google designed it for?

Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by withinboredom on Friday March 13, 2026 @04:00AM (#47361730)
No clue. All I know is that people complain about it every time they benchmark.
Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by pjmlp on Friday March 13, 2026 @04:33AM (#47361923)
It misses having a custom scheduler option, like Java and .NET runtimes offer, unfortunely that is too many knobs for the usual Go approach to language design.

Having a interface for how it is supposed to behave, a runtime.SetScheduler() or something, but it won't happen.

Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by MisterTea on Friday March 13, 2026 @02:04PM (#47367591)
I find it hard to believe the people who built Go, coming from designing Plan 9 and Inferno, would build a language where it is difficult to swap out a component.

I have this feeling that in their quest to make Go simple, they added complexity in other areas. Then again, this was built at Google, not Bell Labs so the culture of building absurdly complex things likely influenced this.

Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by pjmlp on Saturday March 14, 2026 @01:47AM (#47373726)
The same people refused to support generics for several years, and the current design still has some issues to iron out.

Go also lacks some of Limbo features, e.g. plugin package is kind of abandoned. Thus even though dynamic loading is supported, it is hardly usable.

Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by melodyogonna on Friday March 13, 2026 @05:15AM (#47362161)
> If you have a system that requires predictable latency, go is not the right language for it.

Having a garbage collector already make this the case, it is a known trade off.

Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by gf000 on Friday March 13, 2026 @05:27AM (#47362230)
This may have been practically true for a long time, but as Java's ZGC garbage collector proves, this is not a hard truth.

You can have world pauses that are independent of heap size, and thus predictable latency (of course, trading off some throughput, but that is almost fundamental)

Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by pjmlp on Friday March 13, 2026 @09:56AM (#47364535)
Not really, it is a matter of having the right implementation.

- https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/perc

- https://www.aicas.com/products-services/jamaicavm

- https://www.azul.com/products/prime

Not all GCs are born alike.

Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by kevin_thibedeau on Friday March 13, 2026 @10:43AM (#47365173)
Nim's GC is deterministic when you need it.
Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by melodyogonna on Friday March 13, 2026 @08:28PM (#47371911)
How so?
Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by kevin_thibedeau on Saturday March 14, 2026 @12:10AM (#47373253)
You can run it for fixed timeslices.
Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by desdenova on Friday March 13, 2026 @05:47AM (#47362360)
> If you have a system, go is not the right language for it.

FTFY

Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by kjksf on Friday March 13, 2026 @07:34AM (#47363046)
> No matter what load you have, P99 and especially P99.9 latency will be higher than any other language

I strongly call BS on that.

Strong claim and evidence seems to be a hallucination in your own head.

There are several writeups of large backends ported from node/python/ruby to Go which resulted in dramatic speedups, including drop in P99 and P99.9 latencies by 10x

That's empirical evidence your claim is BS.

What exactly is so unfair about Go scheduler and what do you compare it to?

Node's lack of multi-threading?

Python's and Ruby's GIL?

Just leaving this to OS thread scheduler which, unlike Go, has no idea about i/o and therefore cannot optimize for it?

Apparently the source of your claim is https://github.com/php/frankenphp/pull/2016

Which is optimizing for a very specific micro-benchmark of hammering std-lib http server with concurrent request. Which is not what 99% of go servers need to handle. And is exercising way more than a scheduler. And is not benchmarking against any other language, so the sweeping statement about "higher than any other language" is literally baseless.

And you were able to make a change that trades throughput for P99 latency without changing the scheduler, which kind of shows it wasn't the scheduler but an interaction between a specific implementation of HTTP server and Go scheduler.

And there are other HTTP servers in Go that focus on speed. It's just 99.9% of Go servers don't need any of that because the baseline is 10x faster than python/ruby/javascript and on-par with Java or C#.

Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by withinboredom on Friday March 13, 2026 @10:09AM (#47364697)
Do I need to share the TLA+ spec that shows its unfair? Or do you have any actual proof to your claims?
Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by 9rx on Friday March 13, 2026 @11:23AM (#47365703)
It would be helpful for you to share a link to the Github issue you created. If the TLA+ spec you no doubt put a lot of time into creating is contained there, that would be additionally amazing, but more relevant will be the responses from the maintainers so that we're not stuck with one side of the story.

Of course, expecting you to provide the link would be incredibly onerous. We can look it up ourselves just as easy as you can. Well, in theory we can. The only trouble is that I cannot find the issue you are talking about. I cannot find any issues in the Go issue tracker from your account.

So, in the interest of good faith, perhaps you can help us out this one time and point us in the right direction?

Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by withinboredom on Friday March 13, 2026 @12:49PM (#47366771)
I’m not interested in contributing to go. I tried once, was basically ignored. I have contributed to issues there where it has impacted projects I’ve worked on. But even then, it didn’t feel collaborative; mostly felt like dealing with a tech support team instead of other developers.

That being said, I love studying go and learning how to use it to the best of my ability because I work on sub-ųs networking in go.

When I get home, I’ll dig it up. But if you think it’s a fair scheduler, I invite you to just think about it on a whiteboard for a few minutes. It’s nowhere near fair and should be self-evident from first principles alone.

Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by withinboredom on Friday March 13, 2026 @01:08PM (#47367006)
Here’s a much better write up than I’m willing to do: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/rubbing-control-theory/

There are also multiple issues about this on GitHub.

And an open issue that is basically been ignored. golang/go#51071

Like I said. Go won’t fix this because they’ve optimized for throughput at the expense of everything else, which means higher tail latencies. They’d have to give up throughput for lower latency.

Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by 9rx on Friday March 13, 2026 @01:20PM (#47367147)
> And an open issue that is basically been ignored. golang/go#51071

It doesn't look ignored to me. It explains that the test coverage is currently poor, so they are in a terrible position of not being able to make changes until that is rectified.

The first step is to improve the test coverage. Are you volunteering? AI isn't at a point where it is going to magically do it on its own, so it is going to take a willing human hand. You do certainly appear to be the perfect candidate, both having the technical understanding and the need for it.

Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by withinboredom on Friday March 13, 2026 @02:27PM (#47367853)
Heh. I've had my fair share of mailing list drama. This is political AND technical. Someone saying "let’s cut throughput" is going to get shot down fast, no matter the technical merit. If someone with the political clout were to be willing to champion the work and guide the discussion appropriately while someone like me does the work, that's different. That's at least how things like this are done in other communities, unless go is different.
Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by 9rx on Friday March 13, 2026 @03:25PM (#47368585)
> If someone with the political clout were to be willing to champion the work and guide the discussion appropriately while someone like me does the work, that's different.

There is unlikely anyone on the Go team with more political clout in this particular area than the one who has already reached out to you. You obviously didn't respond to him publicly, but did he reject your offer in private? Or are you just imaging some kind of hypothetical scenario where they are refusing to talk to you, despite evidence to the contrary?

Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by withinboredom on Friday March 13, 2026 @06:02PM (#47370577)
> You obviously didn't respond to him publicly, but did he reject your offer in private?

I literally have no idea what you're talking about here.

Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by 9rx on Friday March 13, 2026 @06:34PM (#47370894)
You must not have read all the comments yet? One of Go's key runtime maintainers sent you a message. Now is your opportunity to give him your plan so that he can give you the political support you seek.
Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by withinboredom on Friday March 13, 2026 @06:37PM (#47370920)
I still have no idea what you are talking about.
Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by 9rx on Friday March 13, 2026 @08:47PM (#47372051)
I thought it was a simple question. You don't know if you have read the comments or not?
Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by jerf on Friday March 13, 2026 @11:31AM (#47365806)
"There are several writeups of large backends ported from node/python/ruby to Go which resulted in dramatic speedups, including drop in P99 and P99.9 latencies by 10x"

But that's not comparing apples to apples. When you get a dramatic speedup, you will also see big drops in the P99 and P99.9 latencies because what stressed out the scripting language is a yawn to a compiled language. Just going from stressed->yawning will do wonders for all your latencies, tail latencies included.

That doesn't say anything about what will happen when the load increases enough to start stressing the compiled language.

Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by mknyszek on Friday March 13, 2026 @10:33AM (#47365029)
> Thus, they’ll probably never fix it.

I'm sorry you had a bad experience with Go. What makes you say this? Have you filed an issue upstream yet? If not, I encourage you to do so. I can't promise it'll be fixed or delved into immediately, but filing detailed feedback like this is really helpful for prioritizing work.

Re:Understanding the Go Runtime: The Scheduler by _rlh on Sunday March 15, 2026 @10:30AM (#47387739)
“It’s a problem that only go can solve”

I had this discussion a decade ago and concluded that a reasonable fair scheduler could be built on top of the go runtime scheduler by gating the work presented. The case was be made that the application is the proper, if not only, place to do this. Other than performance, if you encountered a runtime limitation then filing an issue is how the Go community moves forward.