Re: [PATCH] perf: fix symbol processing bug and greatly improve performance

From: Waiman Long
Date: Wed May 08 2013 - 11:44:49 EST


On 05/07/2013 05:30 AM, Jiri Olsa wrote:
On Mon, May 06, 2013 at 09:43:53AM -0400, Waiman Long wrote:
When "perf record" was used on a large machine with a lot of CPUs,
the perf post-processing time could take a lot of minutes and even
hours depending on how large the resulting perf.data file was.

While running AIM7 1500-user high_systime workload on a 80-core x86-64
system with a 3.9 kernel, the workload itself took about 2 minutes
to run and the perf.data file had a size of 1108.746 MB. However,
the post-processing step took more than 10 minutes.

With a gprof-profiled perf binary, the time spent by perf was as
follows:

% cumulative self self total
time seconds seconds calls s/call s/call name
96.90 822.10 822.10 192156 0.00 0.00 dsos__find
0.81 828.96 6.86 172089958 0.00 0.00 rb_next
0.41 832.44 3.48 48539289 0.00 0.00 rb_erase

So 97% (822 seconds) of the time was spent in a single dsos_find()
function. After analyzing the call-graph data below:

-----------------------------------------------
0.00 822.12 192156/192156 map__new [6]
[7] 96.9 0.00 822.12 192156 vdso__dso_findnew [7]
822.10 0.00 192156/192156 dsos__find [8]
0.01 0.00 192156/192156 dsos__add [62]
0.01 0.00 192156/192366 dso__new [61]
0.00 0.00 1/45282525 memdup [31]
0.00 0.00 192156/192230 dso__set_long_name [91]
-----------------------------------------------
822.10 0.00 192156/192156 vdso__dso_findnew [7]
[8] 96.9 822.10 0.00 192156 dsos__find [8]
-----------------------------------------------

It was found that the vdso__dso_findnew() function failed to locate
VDSO__MAP_NAME ("[vdso]") in the dso list and have to insert a new
entry at the end for 192156 times. This problem is due to the fact that
there are 2 types of name in the dso entry - short name and long name.
The initial dso__new() adds "[vdso]" to both the short and long names.
After that, vdso__dso_findnew() modifies the long name to something
like /tmp/perf-vdso.so-NoXkDj. The dsos__find() function only compares
the long name. As a result, the same vdso entry is duplicated many
time in the dso list. This bug increases memory consumption as well
as slows the symbol processing time to a crawl.
hi,
the issue is there and fix looks ok, thanks!

though I'm not able to get vdso callchains to pop out
even by investigating report with vdso heavy workload.

I'll have a closer look..

Is there a chance that the fix will go to v3.10 or have to wait for v3.11?

Regards,
Longman
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/