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We observed that ClickHouse can spend upwards of 80% of its cpu time in pthread_setname_np. This happens because (1) ClickHouse constantly renames its threads for debugging purposes, and (2) thread renaming is relatively expensive on illumos. Since we don't make use of this debugging path, we can work around the performance issue by bailing out of ClickHouse's setThreadName helper early. Note: this patch can't be upstreamed, so a proper long-term fix would involve adding a faster thread rename facility in illumos. Fixes oxidecomputer/customer-support#1101. h/t @wfchandler and @JustinAzoff, who found the bug and did the research.
bnaecker
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May 6, 2026
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I think this seems ok for us, since we don't really use the name at this point. It's probably worth filing a host OS issue for the underlying problem, that setting the name appears much slower than other OS's.
Thanks to you, @wfchandler and @JustinAzoff for tracking this down!
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We observed that ClickHouse can spend upwards of 80% of its cpu time in pthread_setname_np. This happens because (1) ClickHouse constantly renames its threads for debugging purposes, and (2) thread renaming is relatively expensive on illumos. Since we don't make use of this debugging path, we can work around the performance issue by bailing out of ClickHouse's setThreadName helper early.
Note: this patch can't be upstreamed, so a proper long-term fix would involve adding a faster thread rename facility in illumos.
Fixes https://github.com/oxidecomputer/customer-support/issues/1101. h/t @wfchandler and @JustinAzoff, who found the bug and did the research.