Lessons learned from improving a Rust program

Recently, I've been working on a new approximate nearest neighbor search algorithm called RaBitQ. The author has already provided a C++ implementation that runs quite fast. I tried to rewrite it in Rust (yet another RiiR). However, I found that my implementation was much slower than the original one. Here is how I improve the performance step by step.

Prepare the environment

Datasets

The most important thing is to have some reasonable datasets. Since the paper already demonstrate some results on the sift_dim128_1m_l2 and gist_dim960_1m_l2 datasets, 128 and 960 dimensions are typical and 1_000_000 vectors should be sufficient for benchmark purpose. I decided to use them as well. The datasets can be downloaded from here. (Yes, I know this site doesn't have TLS and it only provides FTP downloads).

The format used by these datasets is called fvecs/ivecs, which is a common vector format:

| dim (4 bytes) | vector (4 * dim bytes) |
| dim (4 bytes) | vector (4 * dim bytes) |
...
| dim (4 bytes) | vector (4 * dim bytes) |

You can get the read/write script from my gist.

Profiling tool

I use samply to profile the Rust code. It has a nice integration with the Firefox Profiler. You can also share the profiling results with others by uploading them to the cloud. Here is an example of the C++ version profiling on GIST. The FlameGraph and CallTree are the most common views. Remember to grant the performance event permission and increase the mlock limit:

echo '1' | sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoid
sudo sysctl kernel.perf_event_mlock_kb=2048

The GodBolt compiler explorer is also useful for comparing the assembly function code between C++ and Rust.

Cargo profile

To include the debug information in the release build, you can add another profile to the Cargo.toml:

[profile.perf]
inherits = "release"
debug = true
codegen-units = 16

The compiling cost and runtime speed can greatly affect the profiling user experience.

• cargo build has a faster compile speed, but the code may be slower than pure Python
• cargo build --release runs fast but it might take a long time to compile

For benchmarking, we have no choice but to use the opt-level = 3.

I saw some advice to use the following settings:

codegen-units = 1
lto = "fat"
panic = "abort"

In my case, this only slows down the compilation speed and doesn't improve the performance at all.

Benchmark tool

Criterion is a good statistics-driven benchmark tool. I create another repo to store all the related benchmark codes. It turns out that I should put them in the same repo.

One thing to note is that the benchmark results are not very stable. I have seen ±10% differences without modifying the code. If you're using your laptop, this could be even worse since the CPU might be underclocked due to the high temperature.

I suggest to benchmark the function with several different parameters. In this case, I use different vector dimensions. If the results for all the dimensions are positive, it usually means that the improvement is effective.

Metrics

Remember to add some metrics from the start. Many bugs and performance issues can be found by checking the metrics. I use AtomicU64 directly since the current requirements are simple. I may switch to the Prometheus metrics later.

Note that too many metrics/logging/traces can also affect the performance. So be careful when adding them.

Resources

During the benchmark, I noticed that the end-to-end QPS is extremely unstable. I could get a 15% improvement or deterioration the next day morning without recompiling the code. Then I found that the CPUs are not completely idle as I have VSCode + Rust Analyzer, it seems they don't consume much CPU but they do affect the benchmark results heavily. Even though I'm using Intel Core i7-13700K, which has 8 performance cores and 8 efficient cores, also the program is single-threaded.

I use taskset to bind the process to a specific CPU. This way it won't be affected by mixed cores scheduling.

Note that Intel Core 13th/14th CPUs are affected by the instability problem due to the extremely high voltage. I have fixed this in the BIOS.

Cloud VMs may not be affected by the CPU temperature, but the cloud providers may have their own CPU throttling and overbooking policies.

Step by Step Improvement

Start with a naive implementation

My first release implemented the RaBitQ algorithm based on an algebra library called nalgebra. The main reason is that I need to use the QR decomposition to obtain the orthogonal matrix, which is the key step in the RaBitQ algorithm. Also, a mature linear algebra library provides many useful functions for manipulating the matrix and vectors, making it easier for me to implement the algorithm. Imagine implementing an algorithm involving matrix multiplication, projection and decomposition in Python without numpy, it's a nightmare.

I thought that the performance should be good since nalgebra is optimized for such kind of scenarios. But the benchmark shows that it is much slower than I expected. I guess reimplementing it in numpy would be much faster :(

According to the profiling, there are lots of f32::clone() calls. It takes about 33% of the total time, or 44% if you focus on the query_one function. This reminds me that I can preallocate the memory for some vectors and reuse it in the iteration, a very common trick. So instead of using (x - y).norm_squared(), I need to pre-declare another vector that stores the result of (x - y), which ends up being x.sub_to(y, &mut z); z.norm_squared(). See the commit 23f9aff.

Like most of the algebra libraries, it stores the matrix in the column-major order, which means iterating over the column could be faster than over the row. It's a bit annoying because I have to transpose the matrix before the iteration, and not all the vector/matrix multiplications can detect the dimension mismatch error (1 x dyn or dyn x 1) during compilation.

CPU target

RaBitQ uses the binary dot product distance to estimate the approximate distance, which is computed by:

fn binary_dot_product(x: &[u64], y: &[u64]) -> u32 {
    assert_eq!(x.len(), y.len());
    let mut res = 0;
    for i in 0..x.len() {
        res += (x[i] & y[i]).count_ones();
    }
    res
}

Here the u64::count_ones() would use intrinsics directly, I thought. It turns out that I still need to enable the popcnt feature during the compilation. This could be done by using the RUSTFLAGS="-C target-feature=+popcnt", but I prefer RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native", which enables all the CPU features supported by the current CPU, but also makes the binary non-portable, which is fine for now. The following sections also require this env to enable the AVX2 features.

You can use the following command to check your CPU features:

rustc --print=cfg -C target-cpu=native | rg target_feature

SIMD

The key function for the nearest neighbor search is the distance function, which in this case is the Euclidean distance. We usually use the L2 square distance to avoid the square root computation. The naive implementation is as follows:

{
    y.sub_to(x, &mut residual);
    residual.norm_squared()
}

After the profiling, I found that it still has f32::clone(). By checking the source code of nalgebra, I found that there are many clone for some reasons I don't know. I decide to write the SIMD by hand. Fortunately, hnswlib (a popular HNSW implementation) already implements this.

This eliminates the f32::clone() in the distance computation and improves the QPS by 28% for SIFT. Check the commit 5f82fcc.

My CPU doesn't support AVX512, so I use the AVX2 version. You can check the Steam Hardware Stats, it lists the SIMD support in the "Other Settings". 100% users have SSE3, 94.61% users have AVX2, only 13.06% users have AVX512F. Of course this statistic is biased, most of the cloud Intel CPUs have AVX512 support, game players cannot represent all the users.

To use SIMD, the most useful guide is the Intel Intrinsics Guide. It's better to download the website as the online experience is not good. Remember to check the "latency" and "throughput" of the intrinsics, otherwise, your code may be slower than the normal version.

Another resource is the x86 Intrinsics Cheat Sheet. This is good for newbies like me.

@ashvardanian has a post about the "mask load" that solves the tail elements problem (requires AVX512).

To make the code work on other platforms:

#[cfg(any(target_arch = "x86_64", target_arch = "x86"))]
{
    if is_x86_feature_detected!("avx2") {
        // AVX2 version
    } else {
        // normal version
    }
}

There are some useful crates for writing better cfg for the SIMD, let's keep it simple for now.

More SIMD

SIMD is like a hammer, now I need to find more nails in the code.

• rewrite the binarize_vector function with AVX2 in commit f114fc1 improves the QPS by 32% for GIST.

@andrewaylett pointed out that opt-level=3 can optimize this

Compared to the original C++ version, this implementation is also branchless. When enabling opt-level=3, this can be optimized by the compiler. See the assembly.

- let shift = if (i / 32) % 2 == 0 { 32 } else { 0 };
+ let shift = ((i >> 5) & 1) << 5;

@novax first pointed out that it's equivalent to i & 32, which is more readable.

See the assembly for the difference.

Well, going branchless doesn't make the overall performance much better since the binarize_vector function is called only once for each query. But it's a good learning opportunity.

Scalar quantization

To eliminate more f32::clone() in the code, I decided to replace more nalgebra functions with the manual implementation. The min and max functions are the most common ones. The nalgebra version is like this:

let lower_bound = residual.min();
let upper_bound = residual.max();

This can be done by:

fn min_max(vec: &[f32]) -> (f32, f32) {
    let mut min = f32::MAX;
    let mut max = f32::MIN;
    for v in vec.iter() {
        if *v < min {
            min = *v;
        }
        if *v > max {
            max = *v;
        }
    }
    (min, max)
}

I used to use f32::min() and f32::max() because they are convenient. But for non-(asc/desc) vectors, if has a better performance.

Instead of iterating through the vector several times in a function chain and computing the scalar quantization with sum in different iterations:

let y_scaled = residual.add_scalar(-lower_bound) * one_over_delta + &self.rand_bias;
let y_quantized = y_scaled.map(|v| v.to_u8().expect("convert to u8 error"));
let scalar_sum = y_quantized.iter().fold(0u32, |acc, &v| acc + v as u32);

We can do this in one loop:

{
    let mut sum = 0u32;
    for i in 0..vec.len() {
        let q = ((vec[i] - lower_bound) * multiplier + bias[i]) as u8;
        quantized[i] = q;
        sum += q as u32;
    }
    sum
}

For scalar quantization, we are sure that the f32 can be converted to u8, so we can use as u8 instead of to_u8().unwrap().

The commit af39c1c & commit d2d51b0 improved the QPS by 31% for GIST.

The following part can also be rewritten with SIMD, which improves the QPS by 12% for GIST:

• min/max: commit c97be68 & commit e5a4af0
• scalar quantization: commit 28efe09

I also tried replacing tr_mul with SIMD, which is a vector projection. It turns out that nalgebra uses BLAS here, so the performance stays the same.

Yet another algebra crate: faer

I found another Rust algebra crate called faer while investigating the f32::clone() problem. It's optimized with lots of SIMD and provides better row/column iteration performance. The QR decomposition is also much faster than nalgebra. This commit 0411821 makes the training part faster.

Also, I can now use these vectors as a normal slice without the ColRef or RowRef wrapper after commit 0d969bd.

I have to admit that if I used faer from the beginning, I could avoid lots of troubles. Anyway, I learned a lot from this experience.

Binary dot product

I thought popcnt already solved the binary dot product, but the FlameGraph shows that count_ones() only takes 7% of the binary_dot_product. Although the AVX512 has the vpopcntq instruction, I would prefer to use the AVX2 simulation since it's more common.

This is a good reference for the popcnt implementation with AVX2. The commit edabd4a re-implement this in Rust which improves the QPS by 11% for GIST. This trick only works when the vector has more than 256 dimensions, which means 256 bits for the binary representation.

Inline

The #[inline] attribute should be used with caution. Adding this attribute to all the SIMD functions improves the QPS by 5% for GIST.

IO

I need to add some background information here.

The current implementation is based on the IVF algorithm, which will use k-means to cluster the vectors and store the centroids in memory. The query vector is only compared to the clusters with smaller l2_squared_distance(query, centroid).

There is a parameter called n_probe that controls how many nearest clusters will be probed. A large n_probe will increase the recall but decrease the QPS.

RaBitQ uses the binary dot product to estimate the approximate distance. If it's smaller than the threshold, it will re-rank with the original L2 squared distance and update the threshold accordingly.

Previously, I used slice::select_nth_unstable which only selects the n-nearest but doesn't sort them in order. Going through the clusters that are far away from the query will increase the re-ranking ratio, which requires more L2 squared distance computation. Re-sorting the selected n-th clusters improved the QPS by 4% for GIST.

Another trick is to sort the vectors in each cluster by their distance to the centroids, this commit ea13ebc also improved the QPS by 4% for GIST.

There are some metadata used to estimate the approximate distance for each vector:

• factor_ip: f32
• factor_ppc: f32
• error: f32
• x_c_distance_square: f32

Previously I use 4 Vec<f32> to store them, which is not IO friendly, since the calculation requires vector[i] for each of them. By combining them into one struct in commit bb440e3, the QPS improved by 2.5% for GIST. This works well because it's 4xf32, so I can use the C representation directly:

#[derive(Debug, Clone, Copy, Default, Serialize, Deserialize)]
#[repr(C)]
struct Factor {
    factor_ip: f32,
    factor_ppc: f32,
    error_bound: f32,
    center_distance_square: f32,
}

Unfortunately, faer doesn't support u64 vectors. So I have to store the vector binary representation in Vec<Vec<u64>>. By changing it to Vec<u64> in commit 48236b2, the QPS improved by 2% for GIST.

Const generics

The C++ version uses the template to generate the code for different dimensions. This feature is also available in Rust. I didn't try it because re-compiling the code for different dimensions might only be possible for specific use cases, like inside a company with only a few fixed dimensions. For the public library, it's better to provide a general solution so users don't have to re-compile it by themselves.

Other tools

There is a bounds-check-cookbook which provides several examples of how to eliminate the boundary checking in safe Rust.

I tried PGO and BOLT but didn't get any improvement.

Switching to jemalloc or mimalloc doesn't improve the performance either.

Conclusion

• SIMD is awesome when it's used properly
• IO is also important, especially for the large datasets

The current performance is the same as the C++ version for dataset GIST. While I use more SIMD, the C++ version uses const generics.

References

• Algorithmica / HPC