Reducing latency with esoteric Linux process flags

[IshKebab]

Is this exactly the same bug as this very recent post?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43153901

[scottlamb]

Yes, it is. But clearly in a different codebase. Crazy that two teams were using this same esoteric, broken prctl and diagnosing the problem it caused in such short succession.

[sweca]

Haha, yea. When I was writing this blog post (we had already pushed to production) I came across that post when searching for sources to confirm my findings. Antonio and I were so surprised at the coincidence.

[mmh0000]

What? The headline does not match the article content at all.

There was no reduced latency. The article title should be something along the line of:

"Bad architecture resulted in a hard-to-troubleshoot bug"

[mannyv]

I suppose the latency was reduced because the process wasn't being terminated by the kernel anymore.

Really, the title should say "PR_SET_PDEATHSIG doesn't mean what you think it means."

The man page for PR_SET_PDEATHSIG: "The parent-death signal is sent upon subsequent termination of the parent thread and also upon termination of each subreaper process"

[Neil44]

I think the latency reduced was the 12 seconds to start playing the video via the ai agent. However I was also expecting some mad kernel microsecond based stuff also.