Re: [trace-cmd Patch RFC] trace-cmd: top: A new interface to detect peak memory

[Pratyush Anand <panand@redhat.com>]

On Thursday 27 April 2017 10:19 PM, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Apr 2017 19:32:43 +0530
> Pratyush Anand <panand@redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> I will implement your review comments and will send next revision.
>> However, I had couple of observation which I was unable to justify:
>>
>> # ./trace-cmd top -s /tmp/test
>> # ./trace-cmd top -p /tmp/test | grep trace-cmd
>>    15292           trace-cmd               22144           15808
>
> What does it give for your /tmp/test ?

/tmp/test is name of socket through which both trace aggregator (-s) and 
printer (-p) process are talking to each other.

>
> Note, tracing doesn't start till after trace-cmd is loaded. Everything
> before is not going to be seen.

Yes. So with `./trace-cmd top -s /tmp/test` tracing starts and it aggregates 
stats for all processes including self process as well. After some time I 
execute `./trace-cmd top -p /tmp/test` which prints stats for all the 
processes including self. In the above example, I see that peak memory 
calculated for self process (`./trace-cmd top -s /tmp/test`) was 22144KB.

>
>> Here,15292 is the pid of trace-cmd task
>> 22144 KB is the peak memory usage
>> 15808 KB is the current memory usage
>>
>> Now check rss component from statm
>> # cat /proc/15292/statm
>>    50 35 23 7 0 12 0 36
>>
>> This is a result on ARM64/64KB page size. Therefore, as per statm rss is 35
>> pages = 35*64 = 2240KB
>> I patched my kernel [2] for test purpose, so that statm reports peak memory as
>> well. Here, the last extra entry in statm output is peak memory and it is 36
>> pages = 2304KB.
>> So, this is a huge difference between what has been reported by statm and what
>> we get from trace-cmd.
>> I understand that `trace-cmd top` output would only be approximate, because
>> many of the memory could be allocated by task and freed in interrupt context.
>> So, many a time it can differ. But, is such a huge difference justified? If
>> yes, can we count on the output of this utility to find early boot time oom
>> issues?
>
> Doesn't it only just trace the memory usage of when the tracing starts?

So,should be less than what is being reported by statm, right? But, here we 
see that value reported by trace-cmd is far more than rss value of statm.

Well, there is one known bug in the code, which I am trying to find out a way. 
But, that should not cause this huge difference.

When we receive a trace entry for any new process, we read rss value from 
statm. We think,that these are the memory consumption by that process before 
tracing started. So,we initialize peak and current memory value for that 
process with rss from statm, and then we increase current when there is an 
entry for mm_page_alloc() and decrease when an entry for mm_page_free(). peak 
value of current at any point is reported as peak memory.

Now, lets consider a process p1 which was existing before tracing started. its 
rss was having value r1 KB. we receive first trace entry for p1, which says 
8KB was allocated for p1.

p1->cur = r1 + 8;
p->peak = r1 + 8;

We receive another entry with 4KB de-allocation.

p1->cur = r1 + 4;
p->peak = r1 + 8;

There would have been some of these entries which have also been taken care in 
statm/rss (r1 here). We do not know how many entries were already considered.
Currently, these n (unknown) entries [which had been generated between (a) 1st 
tarce entry and (b) when trace-cmd top reads statm/rss] are considered twice, 
which is a bug.

~Pratyush

>>
>> [1]
>> https://github.com/pratyushanand/trace-cmd/commit/602c2cd96aa613633ad20c6d382e41f7db37a2a4
>> [2]
>> https://github.com/pratyushanand/linux/commit/197e2045361b6b70085c46c78ea6607d8afce517
>