i'm currently trying to find a way to return a static value which would represent how much memory standart a function takes or its time of execution (as a static thread), I thought about using coroutines, however I cannot make any working prototypes, thanks for help in advance ! (:
The Lua function collectgarbage with the string "count" as an argument returns a number that reflects the amount of memory currently in use by the interpreter. Here is a link to an example and more information; I will reproduce the example here:
function memuse()
local i = math.modf(collectgarbage("count") * 1024)
return i
end
This function returns the amount of memory, in kilobytes, currently in use by Lua.
As for time, the simplest way is to call os.time(), which returns the current system time. Note, though, that this only returns the number of seconds to the nearest whole number. If you need greater precision, there are a few options: one, place a system call with io.popen to retrieve the current system time, which includes the non-integer portion; or two, implement some time-related functions in C/C++ and call them from Lua. I have used both options and the second one produces excellent accuracy, but for the sake of simplicity I will just show the first one.
-- Function called 'tick' to retrieve the current OS time.
function tick()
local fil = assert(io.popen("date +%s.%N"))
local str = fil:read("*all")
return tonumber(str)
end
Lua file handles--one of which is produced by the call to io.popen--have their own destructors so they need not be explicitly closed; however, you may want to call fil:close() for the sake of garbage collection and avoiding any open file-related errors.
If you want to pursue the second, more complicated option, I suggest creating a timer class in C++ that makes use of the chrono library to retrieve the system time.
I am not sure that these two functions are of relevance to you, but I hope they help.
Related
The overview is I am prototyping code to understand my problem space, and I am running into 'PANIC: unprotected error in call to Lua API (not enough memory)' errors. I am looking for ways to get around this limit.
The environment bottom line is Torch, a scientific computing framework that runs on LuaJIT, and LuaJIT runs on Lua. I need Torch because I eventually want to hammer on my problem with neural nets on a GPU, but to get there I need a good representation of the problem to feed to the nets. I am (stuck) on Centos Linux, and I suspect that trying to rebuild all the pieces from source in 32bit mode (this is reported to extend the LuaJIT memory limit to 4gb) will be a nightmare if it works at all for all of the libraries.
The problem space itself is probably not particularly relevant, but in overview I have datafiles of points that I calculate distances between and then bin (i.e. make histograms of) these distances to try and work out the most useful ranges. Conveniently I can create complicated Lua tables with various sets of bins and torch.save() the mess of counts out, then pick it up later and inspect with different normalisations etc. -- so after one month of playing I am finding this to be really easy and powerful.
I can make it work looking at up to 3 distances with 15 bins each (15x15x15 plus overhead), but this only by adding explicit garbagecollection() calls and using fork()/wait() for each datafile so that the outer loop will keep running if one datafile (of several thousand) still blows the memory limit and crashes the child. This gets extra painful as each successful child process now has to read, modify and write the current set of bin counts -- and my largest files for this are currently 36mb. I would like to go larger (more bins), and would really prefer to just hold the counts in the 15 gigs of RAM I can't seem to access.
So, here are some paths I have thought of; please do comment if you can confirm/deny that any of them will/won't get me outside of the 1gb boundary, or will just improve my efficiency within it. Please do comment if you can suggest another approach that I have not thought of.
am I missing a way to fire off a Lua process that I can read an arbitrary table back in from? No doubt I can break my problem into smaller pieces, but parsing a return table from stdio (as from a system call to another Lua script) seems error prone, and writing/reading small intermediate files will be a lot of disk i/o.
am I missing a stash-and-access-table-in-high-memory module ? This seems like what I really want, but not found it yet
can FFI C data structures be put outside the 1gb? Doesn't seem like that would be the case but certainly I lack a full understanding of what is causing the limit in the first place. I suspect that this will just get me an efficiency improvement over generic Lua tables for the few pieces that have moved beyond prototyping? (unless I do a bunch of coding for each change)
Surely I can get out by writing an extension in C (Torch appears to support nets that should go outside of the limit), but my brief investigation there turns up references to 'lightuserdata' pointers -- does this mean that a more normal extension won't get outside 1gb either? This also seems like it has the heavy development cost for what should be a prototyping exercise.
I know C well so going the FFI or extension route doesn't bother me - but I know from experience that encapsulating algorithms in this way can be both really elegant and really painful with two places to hide bugs. Working through data structures containing tables within tables on the stack doesn't seem great either. Before I make this effort I would like to be certain that the end result really will solve my problem.
Thanks for reading the long post.
Only object allocated by LuaJIT itself are limited to the first 2GB of memory. This means that tables, strings, full userdata (i.e. not lightuserdata), and FFI objects allocated with ffi.new will count towards the limit, but objects allocated with malloc, mmap, etc. are not subjected to this limit (regardless if called by a C module or the FFI).
An example for allocating a structure with malloc:
ffi.cdef[[
typedef struct { int bar; } foo;
void* malloc(size_t);
void free(void*);
]]
local foo_t = ffi.typeof("foo")
local foo_p = ffi.typeof("foo*")
function alloc_foo()
local obj = ffi.C.malloc(ffi.sizeof(foo_t))
return ffi.cast(foo_p, obj)
end
function free_foo(obj)
ffi.C.free(obj)
end
The new GC to be implemented in LuaJIT 3.0 IIRC will not have this limit, but I haven't heard any news on it's development recently.
Source: http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2012-04/msg00729.html
Here is some follow-up information for those who find this question later:
The key information is as posted by Colonel Thirty Two, that C module extensions and FFI code can easily get outside of the limit. (and the referenced lua list post reminds that plain Lua tables that go outside the limit will be very slow to garbage collect)
It took me some time to pull the pieces together to both access and save/load my objects, so here it is in one place:
I used lds at https://github.com/neomantra/lds as a starting point, in particular the 1-D Array code.
This broke using torch.save(), as it doesn't know how to write the new objects. For each object I added the code below (using Array as the example):
function Array:load(inp)
for i=1,#inp do
self._data[i-1] = tonumber(inp[i])
end
return self
end
function Array:serialize ()
local siz = tonumber(self._size)
io.write(' lds.ArrayT( ffi.typeof("double"), lds.MallocAllocator )( ', siz , "):load({")
for i=0,siz-1 do
io.write(string.format("%a,", self._data[i]))
end
io.write("})")
end
Note that my application specifically uses doubles and malloc(), so a better implementation would store and use these in self rather than hard coding above.
Then as discussed in PiL and elsewhere, I needed a serializer that would handle the object:
function serialize (o)
if type(o) == "number" then
io.write(o)
elseif type(o) == "string" then
io.write(string.format("%q", o))
elseif type(o) == "table" then
io.write("{\n")
for k,v in pairs(o) do
io.write(" ["); serialize(k); io.write("] = ")
serialize(v)
io.write(",\n")
end
io.write("}\n")
elseif o.serialize then
o:serialize()
else
error("cannot serialize a " .. type(o))
end
end
and this needs to be wrapped with:
io.write('do local _ = ')
serialize( myWeirdTable )
io.write('; return _; end')
and then the output from that can be loaded back in with
local myWeirdTableReloaded = dofile('myWeirdTableSaveFile')
See PiL (Programming in Lua book) for dofile()
Hope that helps someone!
You can use the torch tds module. From the README:
Data structures which do not rely on Lua memory allocator, nor being limited by Lua garbage collector.
Only C types can be stored: supported types are currently number, strings, the data structures themselves (see nesting: e.g. it is possible to have a Hash containing a Hash or a Vec), and torch tensors and storages. All data structures can store heterogeneous objects, and support torch serialization.
I am learning Maxima, but having hard time finding how to obtain the cpu time used in call to integrate, when inside a loop construct.
The problem is that the function time(%o1) gives the CPU time used to compute line %o1.
But inside a loop, the whole loop is taken as one operation. So I can't use time() to time single call.
Here is an example
lst:[sin(x),cos(x)];
for i thru length(lst) do
(
result : integrate( lst[i],x)
);
I want to find the cpu time used for each call to integrate, not the cpu time used for the whole loop. Adding showtime: true$ does not really help. I need to obtain the CPU time used for each call, and save the value to a variable.
Is there a way in Maxima to find CPU time used by each call to integrate in the above loop?
Using wxMaxima 15.04.0, windows 7.
Maxima version: 5.36.1
Lisp: SBCL 1.2.7
I was looking for something like Mathematica's AbsoluteTiming function.
instead of elapsed real time, which on my GCL maxima seems to return
absolute real time in seconds, try the lisp function
GET-INTERNAL-RUN-TIME
which you can call from the Maxima command line by
?get-internal-run-time();
This should return run time on any common lisp system. In GCL,
in units of 100 per second.
Perhaps the function you need is elapsed_real_time.
EDIT: you would use it like this:
for i ...
do block ([t0, t1],
t0 : elapsed_real_time (),
integrate (...),
t1 : elapsed_real_time (),
time[i] : t1 - t0);
This question already has answers here:
Closed 11 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
Is R's apply family more than syntactic sugar
Just what the title says. Stupid question, perhaps, but my understanding has been that when using an "apply" function, the iteration is performed in compiled code rather than in the R parser. This would seem to imply that lapply, for instance, is only faster than a "for" loop if there are a great many iterations and each operation is relatively simple. For instance, if a single call to a function wrapped up in lapply takes 10 seconds, and there are only, say, 12 iterations of it, I would imagine that there's virtually no difference at all between using "for" and "lapply".
Now that I think of it, if the function inside the "lapply" has to be parsed anyway, why should there be ANY performance benefit from using "lapply" instead of "for" unless you're doing something that there are compiled functions for (like summing or multiplying, etc)?
Thanks in advance!
Josh
There are several reasons why one might prefer an apply family function over a for loop, or vice-versa.
Firstly, for() and apply(), sapply() will generally be just as quick as each other if executed correctly. lapply() does more of it's operating in compiled code within the R internals than the others, so can be faster than those functions. It appears the speed advantage is greatest when the act of "looping" over the data is a significant part of the compute time; in many general day-to-day uses you are unlikely to gain much from the inherently quicker lapply(). In the end, these all will be calling R functions so they need to be interpreted and then run.
for() loops can often be easier to implement, especially if you come from a programming background where loops are prevalent. Working in a loop may be more natural than forcing the iterative computation into one of the apply family functions. However, to use for() loops properly, you need to do some extra work to set-up storage and manage plugging the output of the loop back together again. The apply functions do this for you automagically. E.g.:
IN <- runif(10)
OUT <- logical(length = length(IN))
for(i in IN) {
OUT[i] <- IN > 0.5
}
that is a silly example as > is a vectorised operator but I wanted something to make a point, namely that you have to manage the output. The main thing is that with for() loops, you always allocate sufficient storage to hold the outputs before you start the loop. If you don't know how much storage you will need, then allocate a reasonable chunk of storage, and then in the loop check if you have exhausted that storage, and bolt on another big chunk of storage.
The main reason, in my mind, for using one of the apply family of functions is for more elegant, readable code. Rather than managing the output storage and setting up the loop (as shown above) we can let R handle that and succinctly ask R to run a function on subsets of our data. Speed usually does not enter into the decision, for me at least. I use the function that suits the situation best and will result in simple, easy to understand code, because I'm far more likely to waste more time than I save by always choosing the fastest function if I can't remember what the code is doing a day or a week or more later!
The apply family lend themselves to scalar or vector operations. A for() loop will often lend itself to doing multiple iterated operations using the same index i. For example, I have written code that uses for() loops to do k-fold or bootstrap cross-validation on objects. I probably would never entertain doing that with one of the apply family as each CV iteration needs multiple operations, access to lots of objects in the current frame, and fills in several output objects that hold the output of the iterations.
As to the last point, about why lapply() can possibly be faster that for() or apply(), you need to realise that the "loop" can be performed in interpreted R code or in compiled code. Yes, both will still be calling R functions that need to be interpreted, but if you are doing the looping and calling directly from compiled C code (e.g. lapply()) then that is where the performance gain can come from over apply() say which boils down to a for() loop in actual R code. See the source for apply() to see that it is a wrapper around a for() loop, and then look at the code for lapply(), which is:
> lapply
function (X, FUN, ...)
{
FUN <- match.fun(FUN)
if (!is.vector(X) || is.object(X))
X <- as.list(X)
.Internal(lapply(X, FUN))
}
<environment: namespace:base>
and you should see why there can be a difference in speed between lapply() and for() and the other apply family functions. The .Internal() is one of R's ways of calling compiled C code used by R itself. Apart from a manipulation, and a sanity check on FUN, the entire computation is done in C, calling the R function FUN. Compare that with the source for apply().
From Burns' R Inferno (pdf), p25:
Use an explicit for loop when each
iteration is a non-trivial task. But a
simple loop can be more clearly and
compactly expressed using an apply
function. There is at least one
exception to this rule ... if the result will
be a list and some of the components
can be NULL, then a for loop is
trouble (big trouble) and lapply gives
the expected answer.
In Lua, one would usually generate random values, and/or strings by using math.random & math.randomseed, where os.time is used for math.randomseed.
This method however has one major weakness; The returned number is always just as random as the current time, AND the interval for each random number is one second, which is way too long if one needs many random values in a very short time.
This issue is even pointed out by the Lua Users wiki: http://lua-users.org/wiki/MathLibraryTutorial, and the corresponding RandomStringS receipe: http://lua-users.org/wiki/RandomStrings.
So I've sat down and wrote a different algorithm (if it even can be called that), that generates random numbers by (mis-)using the memory addresses of tables:
math.randomseed(os.time())
function realrandom(maxlen)
local tbl = {}
local num = tonumber(string.sub(tostring(tbl), 8))
if maxlen ~= nil then
num = num % maxlen
end
return num
end
function string.random(length,pattern)
local length = length or 11
local pattern = pattern or '%a%d'
local rand = ""
local allchars = ""
for loop=0, 255 do
allchars = allchars .. string.char(loop)
end
local str=string.gsub(allchars, '[^'..pattern..']','')
while string.len(rand) ~= length do
local randidx = realrandom(string.len(str))
local randbyte = string.byte(str, randidx)
rand = rand .. string.char(randbyte)
end
return rand
end
At first, everything seems perfectly random, and I'm sure they are... at least for the current program.
So my question is, how random are these numbers returned by realrandom really?
Or is there an even better way to generate random numbers in a shorter interval than one second (which kind of implies that os.time shouldn't be used, as explaind above), without relying on external libraries, AND, if possible, in an entirely crossplatform manner?
EDIT:
There seems to be a major misunderstanding regarding the way the RNG is seeded; In production code, the call to math.randomseed() happens just once, this was just a badly chosen example here.
What I mean by the random value is only random once per second, is easily demonstrated by this paste: http://codepad.org/4cDsTpcD
As this question will get downvoted regardless my edits, I also cancelled my previously accepted answer - In hope for a better one, even if just better opinions. I understand that issues regarding random values/numbers has been discussed many times before, but I have not found such a question that could be relevant to Lua - Please keep that in mind!
You should not call seed each time you call random, you ought to call it only once, on the program initialization (unless you get the seed from somewhere, for example, to replicate some previous "random" behaviour).
Standard Lua random generator is of poor quality in the statistical sense (as it is, in fact, standard C random generator), do not use it if you care for that. Use, for example, lrandom module (available in LuaRocks).
If you need more secure random, read from /dev/random on Linux. (I think that Windows should have something along the same lines — but you may need to code something in C to use it.)
Relying on table pointer values is a bad idea. Think about alternate Lua implementations, in Java, for example — there is no telling what they would return. (Also, the pointer values may be predictable, and they may be, under certain circumstances the same each time the program is invoked.)
If you want finer precision for the seed (and you will want this only if you're launching the program more often than once per second), you should use a timer with better resolution. For example, socket.gettime() from LuaSocket. Multiply it by some value, since math.randomseed is working with integer part only, and socket.gettime() returns time in (floating point) seconds.
require 'socket'
math.randomseed(socket.gettime() * 1e6)
for i = 1, 1e3 do
print(math.random())
end
This method however has one major
weakness; The returned number is
always just as random as the current
time, AND the interval for each random
number is one second, which is way too
long if one needs many random values
in a very short time.
It has those weaknesses only if you implement it incorrectly.
math.randomseed is supposed to be called sparingly - usually just once at the beginning of your program, and it usually seeds using os.time. Once the seed is set, you can use math.random many times, and it will yield random values.
See what happens on this sample:
> math.randomseed(1)
> return math.random(), math.random(), math.random()
0.84018771715471 0.39438292681909 0.78309922375861
> math.randomseed(2)
> return math.random(), math.random(), math.random()
0.70097636929759 0.80967634907443 0.088795455214007
> math.randomseed(1)
> return math.random(), math.random(), math.random()
0.84018771715471 0.39438292681909 0.78309922375861
When I change the seed from 1 to 2, I get different random results. But when I go back to 1, the "random sequence" is reset. I obtain the same values as before.
os.time() returns an ever-increasing number. Using it as a seed is appropriate; then you can invoke math.random forever and have different random numbers every time you invoke it.
The only scenario you have to be a bit worried about non-randomness is when your program is supposed to be executed more than once per second. In that case, as the others are saying, the simplest solution is using a clock with higher definition.
In other words:
Invoke math.randomseed with an appropiate seed (os.time() is ok 99% of the cases) at the beginning of your program
Invoke math.random every time you need a random number.
Regards!
Some thoughts on the first part of your question:
So my question is, how random are these numbers returned by realrandom really?
Your function is attempting to discover the address of a table by using a quirk of its default implementation of tostring(). I don't believe that the string returned by tostring{} has a specified format, or that the value included in that string has any documented meaning. In practice, it is derived from the address of something related to the specific table, and so distinct tables convert to distinct strings. However, the next version of Lua is free to change that to anything that is convenient. Worse, the format it takes will be highly platform dependent because it appears to use the %p format specifier to sprintf() which is only specified as being a sensible representation of a pointer.
There's also a much bigger issue. While the address of the nth table created in a process might seem random on your platform, tt might not be random at all. Or it might vary in only a few bits. For example, on my win7 box only a few bits vary, and not very randomly:
C:...>for /L %i in (1,1,20) do # lua -e "print{}"
table: 0042E5D8
table: 0061E5D8
table: 0024E5D8
table: 0049E5D8
table: 0042E5D8
table: 0042E5D8
table: 0042E5D8
table: 0064E5D8
table: 0042E5D8
table: 002FE5D8
table: 0042E5D8
table: 0049E5D8
table: 0042E5D8
table: 0042E5D8
table: 0042E5D8
table: 0024E5D8
table: 0042E5D8
table: 0042E5D8
table: 0061E5D8
table: 0042E5D8
Other platforms will vary, of course. I'd even expect there to be platforms where the address of the first allocated table is completely deterministic, and hence identical on every run of the program.
In short, the address of an arbitrary object in your process image is not a very good source of randomness.
Edit: For completeness, I'd like to add a couple of other thoughts that came to mind over night.
The stock tostring() function is supplied by the base library and implemented by the function luaB_tostring(). The relevant bit is this fragment:
switch (lua_type(L, 1)) {
...
default:
lua_pushfstring(L, "%s: %p", luaL_typename(L, 1), lua_topointer(L, 1));
break;
If you really are calling this function, then the end of the string will be an address, represented by standard C sprintf() format %p, strongly related to the specific table. One observation is that I've seen several distinct implementations for %p. Windows MSVCR80.DLL (the version of the C library used by the current release of Lua for Windows) makes it equivalent to %08X. My Ubuntu Karmic Koala box appears to make it equivalent to %#x which notably drops leading zeros. If you are going to parse out that part of the string, then you should do it in a way that is more flexible in the face of variation of the meaning of %p.
Note, also, that doing anything like this in library code may expose you to a couple of surprises.
First, if the table passed to tostring() has a metatable that provides the function __tostring(), then that function will be called, and the fragment quoted above will never be executed at all. In your case, that issue cannot arise because tables have individual metatables, and you didn't accidentally apply a metatable to your local table.
Second, by the time your module loads, some other module or user-supplied code might have replaced the stock tostring() with something else. If the replacement is benign, (such as a memoization wrapper) then it likely doesn't matter to the code as written. However, this would be a source of attack, and is entirely outside the control of your module. That doesn't strike me as a good idea if the goal is some kind of improved security for your random seed material.
Third, you might not be loaded in a stock Lua interpreter at all, and the larger application (Lightroom, WoW, Wireshark, ...) may choose to replace the base library functions with their own implementations. This is a much less likely issue for tostring(), but note that the base library's print() is a frequent target for replacement or removal in alternate implementations and there are modules (Lua Lanes, for one) that break if print is not the implementation in the base library.
A few important things come to mind:
In most other languages you typically only call the random 'seed' function once at the beginning of the program or perhaps at limited times throughout its execution. You generally do not want to call it each time you generate a random number/sequence. If you call it once when the program starts you get around the "once per second" limitation. By calling it each time you may actually end up with less randomness in your results.
Your realrandom() function seems to rely on a private implementation detail of Lua. What happens in the next major release if this detail changes to always return the same number, or only even numbers, etc.... Just because it works for now is not a strong enough guarantee, especially in the case of wanting a secure RNG.
When you say "everything seems perfectly random" how are you measuring this performance? We humans are terrible at determining if a sequence is random or not and just looking at a sequence of numbers would be virtually impossible to truly tell if they were random or not. There are many ways to quantify the "randomness" of a series including frequency distribution, autocorrelation, compression, and many more far beyond my understanding.
If you are writing a true "secure PRNG" for production do not write your own! Investigate and use a library or algorithm by experts who has spent years/decades studying, designing and trying to break it. True secure random number generation is hard.
If you need more info start on the PRNG article on Wikipedia and use the references/links there as needed.
I've been writing some scripts for a game, the scripts are written in Lua. One of the requirements the game has is that the Update method in your lua script (which is called every frame) may take no longer than about 2-3 milliseconds to run, if it does the game just hangs.
I solved this problem with coroutines, all I have to do is call Multitasking.RunTask(SomeFunction) and then the task runs as a coroutine, I then have to scatter Multitasking.Yield() throughout my code, which checks how long the task has been running for, and if it's over 2 ms it pauses the task and resumes it next frame. This is ok, except that I have to scatter Multitasking.Yield() everywhere throughout my code, and it's a real mess.
Ideally, my code would automatically yield when it's been running too long. So, Is it possible to take a Lua function as an argument, and then execute it line by line (maybe interpreting Lua inside Lua, which I know is possible, but I doubt it's possible if all you have is a function pointer)? In this way I could automatically check the runtime and yield if necessary between every single line.
EDIT:: To be clear, I'm modding a game, that means I only have access to Lua. No C++ tricks allowed.
check lua_sethook in the Debug Interface.
I haven't actually tried this solution myself yet, so I don't know for sure how well it will work.
debug.sethook(coroutine.yield,"",10000);
I picked the number arbitrarily; it will have to be tweaked until it's roughly the time limit you need. Keep in mind that time spent in C functions etc will not increase the instruction count value, so a loop will reach this limit far faster than calls to long-running C functions. It may be viable to set a far lower value and instead provide a function that sees how much os.clock() or similar has increased.