use unsorted array in Timers._unrefActive() by Fishrock123 · Pull Request #2540 · nodejs/node
Before this change, _unrefActive would keep the unrefList sorted when adding a new timer. Because _unrefActive is called extremely frequently, this linear scan (O(n) at worse) would make _unrefActive show high in the list of contributors when profiling CPU usage. This commit changes _unrefActive so that it doesn't try to keep the unrefList sorted. The insertion thus happens in constant time. However, when a timer expires, unrefTimeout has to go through the whole unrefList because it's not ordered anymore. It is usually not large enough to have a significant impact on performance because: - Most of the time, the timers will be removed before unrefTimeout is called because their users (sockets mainly) cancel them when an I/O operation takes place. - If they're not, it means that some I/O took a long time to happen, and the initiator of subsequents I/O operations that would add more timers has to wait for them to complete. With this change, _unrefActive does not show as a significant contributor in CPU profiling reports anymore. Fixes: nodejs/node-v0.x-archive#8160 PR-URL: nodejs/node-v0.x-archive#8751 Signed-off-by: Timothy J Fontaine <tjfontaine@gmail.com> Conflicts: lib/timers.js