Branch-aware programming - c++

Question

I'm reading around that branch misprediction can be a hot bottleneck for the performance of an application. As I can see, people often show assembly code that unveil the problem and state that programmers usually can predict where a branch could go the most of the times and avoid branch mispredictons.
My questions are:
Is it possible to avoid branch mispredictions using some high level programming technique (i.e. no assembly)?
What should I keep in mind to produce branch-friendly code in a high level programming language (I'm mostly interested in C and C++)?
Code examples and benchmarks are welcome.

Answer 1

people often ... and state that programmers usually can predict where a branch could go
(*) Experienced programmers often remind that human programmers are very bad at predicting that.
1- Is it possible to avoid branch mispredictions using some high level programming technique (i.e. no assembly)?
Not in standard c++ or c. At least not for a single branch. What you can do is minimize the depth of your dependency chains so that branch mis-prediction would not have any effect. Modern cpus will execute both code paths of a branch and drop the one that wasn't chosen. There's a limit to this however, which is why branch prediction only matters in deep dependency chains.
Some compilers provide extension for suggesting the prediction manually such as __builtin_expect in gcc. Here is a stackoverflow question about it. Even better, some compilers (such as gcc) support profiling the code and automatically detect the optimal predictions. It's smart to use profiling rather than manual work because of (*).
2- What should I keep in mind to produce branch-friendly code in a high level programming language (I'm mostly interested in C and C++)?
Primarily, you should keep in mind that branch mis-prediction is only going to affect you in the most performance critical part of your program and not to worry about it until you've measured and found a problem.
But what can I do when some profiler (valgrind, VTune, ...) tells that on line n of foo.cpp I got a branch prediction penalty?
Lundin gave very sensible advice
Measure fo find out whether it matters.
If it matters, then
Minimize the depth of dependency chains of your calculations. How to do that can be quite complicated and beyond my expertise and there's not much you can do without diving into assembly. What you can do in a high level language is to minimize the number of conditional checks (**). Otherwise you're at the mercy of compiler optimization. Avoiding deep dependency chains also allows more efficient use of out-of-order superscalar processors.
Make your branches consistently predictable. The effect of that can be seen in this stackoverflow question. In the question, there is a loop over an array. The loop contains a branch. The branch depends on size of the current element. When the data was sorted, the loop could be demonstrated to be much faster when compiled with a particular compiler and run on a particular cpu. Of course, keeping all your data sorted will also cost cpu time, possibly more than the branch mis-predictions do, so, measure.
If it's still a problem, use profile guided optimization (if available).
Order of 2. and 3. may be switched. Optimizing your code by hand is a lot of work. On the other hand, gathering the profiling data can be difficult for some programs as well.
(**) One way to do that is transform your loops by for example unrolling them. You can also let the optimizer do it automatically. You must measure though, because unrolling will affect the way you interact with the cache and may well end up being a pessimization.

Answer 2

As a caveat, I'm not a micro-optimization wizard. I don't know exactly how the hardware branch predictor works. To me it's a magical beast against which I play scissors-paper-stone and it seems to be able to read my mind and beat me all the time. I'm a design & architecture type.
Nevertheless, since this question was about a high-level mindset, I might be able to contribute some tips.
Profiling
As said, I'm not a computer architecture wizard, but I do know how to profile code with VTune and measure things like branch mispredictions and cache misses and do it all the time being in a performance-critical field. That's the very first thing you should be looking into if you don't know how to do this (profiling). Most of these micro-level hotspots are best discovered in hindsight with a profiler in hand.
Branch Elimination
A lot of people are giving some excellent low-level advice on how to improve the predictability of your branches. You can even manually try to aid the branch predictor in some cases and also optimize for static branch prediction (writing if statements to check for the common cases first, e.g.). There's a comprehensive article on the nitty-gritty details here from Intel: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/branch-and-loop-reorganization-to-prevent-mispredicts.
However, doing this beyond a basic common case/rare case anticipation is very hard to do and it is almost always best saved for later after you measure. It's just too difficult for humans to be able to accurately predict the nature of the branch predictor. It's far more difficult to predict than things like page faults and cache misses, and even those are almost impossible to perfectly humanly-predict in a complex codebase.
However, there is an easier, high-level way to mitigate branch misprediction, and that's to avoid branching completely.
Skipping Small/Rare Work
One of the mistakes I commonly made earlier in my career and see a lot of peers trying to do when they're starting out, before they've learned to profile and are still going by hunches, is to try to skip small or rare work.
An example of this is memoizing to a large look-up table to avoid repeatedly doing some relatively-cheap computations, like using a look-up table that spans megabytes to avoid repeatedly calling cos and sin. To a human brain, this seems like it's saving work to compute it once and store it, except often loading the memory from this giant LUT down through the memory hierarchy and into a register often ends up being even more expensive than the computations they were intended to save.
Another case is adding a bunch of little branches to avoid small computations which are harmless to do unnecessarily (won't impact correctness) throughout the code as a naive attempt at optimization, only to find the branching costs more than just doing unnecessary computations.
This naive attempt at branching as an optimization can also apply even for slightly-expensive but rare work. Take this C++ example:
struct Foo
{
...
Foo& operator=(const Foo& other)
{
// Avoid unnecessary self-assignment.
if (this != &other)
{
...
}
return *this;
}
...
};
Note that this is somewhat of a simplistic/illustrative example as most people implement copy assignment using copy-and-swap against a parameter passed by value and avoid branching anyway no matter what.
In this case, we're branching to avoid self-assignment. Yet if self-assignment is only doing redundant work and doesn't hinder the correctness of the result, it can often give you a boost in real-world performance to simply allow the self-copying:
struct Foo
{
...
Foo& operator=(const Foo& other)
{
// Don't check for self-assignment.
...
return *this;
}
...
};
... this can help because self-assignment tends to be quite rare. We're slowing down the rare case by redundantly self-assigning, but we're speeding up the common case by avoiding the need to check in all other cases. Of course that's unlikely to reduce branch mispredictions significantly since there is a common/rare case skew in terms of the branching, but hey, a branch that doesn't exist can't be mispredicted.
A Naive Attempt at a Small Vector
As a personal story, I formerly worked in a large-scale C codebase which often had a lot of code like this:
char str[256];
// do stuff with 'str'
... and naturally since we had a pretty extensive user base, some rare user out there would eventually type in a name for a material in our software that was over 255 characters in length and overflow the buffer, leading to segfaults. Our team was getting into C++ and started porting a lot of these source files to C++ and replacing such code with this:
std::string str = ...;
// do stuff with 'str'
... which eliminated those buffer overruns without much effort. However, at least back then, containers like std::string and std::vector were heap(free store)-allocated structures, and we found ourselves trading correctness/safety for efficiency. Some of these replaced areas were performance-critical (called in tight loops), and while we eliminated a lot of bug reports with these mass replacements, the users started noticing the slowdowns.
So then we wanted something which was like a hybrid between these two techniques. We wanted to be able to slap something in there to achieve safety over the C-style fixed-buffer variants (which were perfectly fine and very efficient for common-case scenarios), but still work for the rare-case scenarios where the buffer wasn't big enough for user inputs. I was one of the performance geeks on the team and one of the few using a profiler (I unfortunately worked with a lot of people who thought they were too smart to use one), so I got called into the task.
My first naive attempt was something like this (vastly simplified: the actual one used placement new and so forth and was a fully standard-compliant sequence). It involves using a fixed-size buffer (size specified at compile-time) for the common case and a dynamically-allocated one if the size exceeded that capacity.
template <class T, int N>
class SmallVector
{
public:
...
T& operator[](int n)
{
return num < N ? buf[n]: ptr[n];
}
...
private:
T buf[N];
T* ptr;
};
This attempt was an utter fail. While it didn't pay the price of the heap/free store to construct, the branching in operator[] made it even worse than std::string and std::vector<char> and was showing up as a profiling hotspot instead of malloc (our vendor implementation of std::allocator and operator new used malloc under the hood). So then I quickly got the idea to simply assign ptr to buf in the constructor. Now ptr points to buf even in the common case scenario, and now operator[] can be implemented like this:
T& operator[](int n)
{
return ptr[n];
}
... and with that simple branch elimination, our hotspots went away. We now had a general-purpose, standard-compliant container we could use that was just about as fast as the former C-style, fixed-buffer solution (only difference being one additional pointer and a few more instructions in the constructor), but could handle those rare-case scenarios where the size needed to be larger than N. Now we use this even more than std::vector (but only because our use cases favor a bunch of teeny, temporary, contiguous, random-access containers). And making it fast came down to just eliminating a branch in operator[].
Common Case/Rare Case Skewing
One of the things learned after profiling and optimizing for years is that there's no such thing as "absolutely-fast-everywhere" code. A lot of the act of optimization is trading an inefficiency there for greater efficiency here. Users might perceive your code as absolutely-fast-everywhere, but that comes from smart tradeoffs where the optimizations are aligning with the common case (common case being both aligned with realistic user-end scenarios and coming from hotspots pointed out from a profiler measuring those common scenarios).
Good things tend to happen when you skew the performance towards the common case and away from the rare case. For the common case to get faster, often the rare case must get slower, yet that's a good thing.
Zero-Cost Exception-Handling
An example of common case/rare case skewing is the exception-handling technique used in a lot of modern compilers. They apply zero-cost EH, which isn't really "zero-cost" all across the board. In the case that an exception is thrown, they're now slower than ever before. Yet in the case where an exception isn't thrown, they're now faster than ever before and often faster in successful scenarios than code like this:
if (!try_something())
return error;
if (!try_something_else())
return error;
...
When we use zero-cost EH here instead and avoid checking for and propagating errors manually, things tend to go even faster in the non-exceptional cases than this style of code above. Crudely speaking, it's due to the reduced branching. Yet in exchange, something far more expensive has to happen when an exception is thrown. Nevertheless, that skew between common case and rare case tends to aid real-world scenarios. We don't care quite as much about the speed of failing to load a file (rare case) as loading it successfully (common case), and that's why a lot of modern C++ compilers implement "zero-cost" EH. It is again in the interest of skewing the common case and rare case, pushing them further away from each in terms of performance.
Virtual Dispatch and Homogeneity
A lot of branching in object-oriented code where the dependencies flow towards abstractions (stable abstractions principle, e.g.), can have a large bulk of its branching (besides loops of course, which play well to the branch predictor) in the form of dynamic dispatch (virtual function calls or function pointer calls).
In these cases, a common temptation is to aggregate all kinds of sub-types into a polymorphic container storing a base pointer, looping through it and calling virtual methods on each element in that container. This can lead to a lot of branch mispredictions, especially if this container is being updated all the time. The pseudocode might look like this:
for each entity in world:
entity.do_something() // virtual call
A strategy to avoid this scenario is to start sorting this polymorphic container based on its sub-types. This is a fairly old-style optimization popular in the gaming industry. I don't know how helpful it is today, but it is a high-level kind of optimization.
Another way I've found to be definitely still be useful even in recent cases which achieves a similar effect is to break the polymorphic container apart into multiple containers for each sub-type, leading to code like this:
for each human in world.humans():
human.do_something()
for each orc in world.orcs():
orc.do_something()
for each creature in world.creatures():
creature.do_something()
... naturally this hinders the maintainability of the code and reduces the extensibility. However, you don't have to do this for every single sub-type in this world. We only need to do it for the most common. For example, this imaginary video game might consist, by far, of humans and orcs. It might also have fairies, goblins, trolls, elves, gnomes, etc., but they might not be nearly as common as humans and orcs. So we only need to split the humans and orcs away from the rest. If you can afford it, you can also still have a polymorphic container that stores all of these subtypes which we can use for less performance-critical loops. This is somewhat akin to hot/cold splitting for optimizing locality of reference.
Data-Oriented Optimization
Optimizing for branch prediction and optimizing memory layouts tends to kind of blur together. I've only rarely attempted optimizations specifically for the branch predictor, and that was only after I exhausted everything else. Yet I've found that focusing a lot on memory and locality of reference did make my measurements result in fewer branch mispredictions (often without knowing exactly why).
Here it can help to study data-oriented design. I've found some of the most useful knowledge relating to optimization comes from studying memory optimization in the context of data-oriented design. Data-oriented design tends to emphasize fewer abstractions (if any), and bulkier, high-level interfaces that process big chunks of data. By nature such designs tend to reduce the amount of disparate branching and jumping around in code with more loopy code processing big chunks of homogeneous data.
It often helps, even if your goal is to reduce branch misprediction, to focus more on consuming data more quickly. I've found some great gains before from branchless SIMD, for example, but the mindset was still in the vein of consuming data more quickly (which it did, and thanks to some help from here on SO like Harold).
TL;DR
So anyway, these are some strategies to potentially reduce branch mispredictions throughout your code from a high-level standpoint. They're devoid of the highest level of expertise in computer architecture, but I'm hoping this is an appropriate kind of helpful response given the level of the question being asked. A lot of this advice is kind of blurred with optimization in general, but I've found that optimizing for branch prediction often needs to be blurred with optimizing beyond it (memory, parallelization, vectorization, algorithmic). In any case, the safest bet is to make sure you have a profiler in your hand before you venture deep.

Answer 3

Linux kernel defines likely and unlikely macros based on __builtin_expect gcc builtins:
#define likely(x) __builtin_expect(!!(x), 1)
#define unlikely(x) __builtin_expect(!!(x), 0)
(See here for the macros definitions in include/linux/compiler.h)
You can use them like:
if (likely(a > 42)) {
/* ... */
}
or
if (unlikely(ret_value < 0)) {
/* ... */
}

Answer 4

In general it's a good idea to keep hot inner loops well proportioned to the cache sizes most commonly encountered. That is, if your program handles data in lumps of, say, less than 32kbytes at a time and does a decent amount of work on it then you're making good use of the L1 cache.
In contrast if your hot inner loop chews through 100MByte of data and performs only one operation on each data item, then the CPU will spend most of the time fetching data from DRAM.
This is important because part of the reason CPUs have branch prediction in the first place is to be able to pre-fetch operands for the next instruction. The performance consequences of a branch mis-prediction can be reduced by arranging your code so that there's a good chance that the next data comes from L1 cache no matter what branch is taken. Whilst not a perfect strategy, L1 cache sizes seem to be universally stuck on 32 or 64K; it's almost a constant thing across the industry. Admittedly coding in this way is not often straightforward, and relying on profile driven optimisation, etc. as recommended by others is probably the most straightforward way ahead.
Regardless of anything else, whether or not a problem with branch mis-prediction will occur varies according to the CPU's cache sizes, what else is running on the machine, what the main memory bandwidth / latency is, etc.

Answer 5

Perhaps the most common techniques is to use separate methods for normal and error returns. C has no choice, but C++ has exceptions. Compilers are aware that the exception branches are exceptional and therefore unexpected.
This means that exception branches are indeed slow, as they're unpredicted, but the non-error branch is made faster. On average, this is a net win.

Answer 6

1- Is it possible to avoid branch mispredictions using some high level programming technique (i.e. no assembly)?
Avoid? Perhaps not. Reduce? Certainly...
2- What should I keep in mind to produce branch-friendly code in a high level programming language (I'm mostly interested in C and C++)?
It is worth noting that optimisation for one machine isn't necessarily optimisation for another. With that in mind, profile-guided optimisation is reasonably good at rearranging branches, based on whichever test input you give it. This means you don't need to do any programming to perform this optimisation, and it should be relatively tailored to whichever machine you're profiling on. Obviously, the best results will be achieved when your test input and the machine you profile on roughly matches what common expectations... but those are also considerations for any other optimisations, branch-prediction related or otherwise.

Answer 7

To answer your questions let me explain how does branch prediction works.
First of all, there is a branch penalty when the processor correctly predicts the taken branches. If the processor predicts a branch as taken, then it has to know the target of the predicted branch since execution flow will continue from that address. Assuming that the branch target address is already stored in Branch Target Buffer(BTB), it has to fetch new instructions from the address found in BTB. So you are still wasting a few clock cycles even if the branch is correctly predicted.
Since BTB has an associative cache structure the target address might not be present, and hence more clock cycles might be wasted.
On the other, hand if the CPU predicts a branch as not taken and if it's correct then there is no penalty since the CPU already knows where the consecutive instructions are.
As I explained above, predicted not taken branches have higher throughput than predicted taken branches.
Is it possible to avoid branch misprediction using some high level programming technique (i.e. no assembly)?
Yes, it is possible. You can avoid by organizing your code in way that all branches have repetitive branch pattern such that always taken or not taken.
But if you want to get higher throughput you should organize branches in a way that they are most likely to be not taken as I explained above.
What should I keep in mind to produce branch-friendly code in a high
level programming language (I'm mostly interested in C and C++)?
If it's possible eliminate branches as possible. If this is not the case when writing if-else or switch statements, check the most common cases first to make sure the branches most likely to be not taken. Try to use __builtin_expect(condition, 1) function to force compiler to produce condition to be treated as not taken.

Answer 8

Branchless isn't always better, even if both sides of the branch are trivial. When branch prediction works, it's faster than a loop-carried data dependency.
See gcc optimization flag -O3 makes code slower than -O2 for a case where gcc -O3 transforms an if() to branchless code in a case where it's very predictable, making it slower.
Sometimes you are confident that a condition is unpredictable (e.g. in a sort algorithm or binary search). Or you care more about the worst-case not being 10x slower than about the fast-case being 1.5x faster.
Some idioms are more likely to compile to a branchless form (like a cmov x86 conditional move instruction).
x = x>limit ? limit : x; // likely to compile branchless
if (x>limit) x=limit; // less likely to compile branchless, but still can
The first way always writes to x, while the second way doesn't modify x in one of the branches. This seems to be the reason that some compilers tend to emit a branch instead of a cmov for the if version. This applies even when x is a local int variable that's already live in a register, so "writing" it doesn't involve a store to memory, just changing the value in a register.
Compilers can still do whatever they want, but I've found this difference in idiom can make a difference. Depending on what you're testing, it's occasionally better to help the compiler mask and AND rather than doing a plain old cmov. I did it in that answer because I knew that the compiler would have what it needed to generate the mask with a single instruction (and from seeing how clang did it).
TODO: examples on http://gcc.godbolt.org/