[PATCH 3/6] perf tools: Make perf_event__synthesize_mmap_events() scale

From: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo
Date: Thu Mar 16 2017 - 12:10:18 EST


From: Stephane Eranian <eranian@xxxxxxxxxx>

This patch significantly improves the execution time of
perf_event__synthesize_mmap_events() when running perf record on systems
where processes have lots of threads.

It just happens that cat /proc/pid/maps support uses a O(N^2) algorithm to
generate each map line in the maps file. If you have 1000 threads, then you
have necessarily 1000 stacks. For each vma, you need to check if it
corresponds to a thread's stack. With a large number of threads, this can take
a very long time. I have seen latencies >> 10mn.

As of today, perf does not use the fact that a mapping is a stack, therefore we
can work around the issue by using /proc/pid/tasks/pid/maps. This entry does
not try to map a vma to stack and is thus much faster with no loss of
functonality.

The proc-map-timeout logic is kept in case users still want some upper limit.

In V2, we fix the file path from /proc/pid/tasks/pid/maps to actual
/proc/pid/task/pid/maps, tasks -> task. Thanks Arnaldo for catching this.

Committer note:

This problem seems to have been elliminated in the kernel since commit :
b18cb64ead40 ("fs/proc: Stop trying to report thread stacks").

Signed-off-by: Stephane Eranian <eranian@xxxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Namhyung Kim <namhyung@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170315135059.GC2177@xxxxxxxxxx
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1489598233-25586-1-git-send-email-eranian@xxxxxxxxxx
Signed-off-by: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
tools/perf/util/event.c | 4 ++--
1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/tools/perf/util/event.c b/tools/perf/util/event.c
index d082cb70445d..33fc2e9c0b0c 100644
--- a/tools/perf/util/event.c
+++ b/tools/perf/util/event.c
@@ -325,8 +325,8 @@ int perf_event__synthesize_mmap_events(struct perf_tool *tool,
if (machine__is_default_guest(machine))
return 0;

- snprintf(filename, sizeof(filename), "%s/proc/%d/maps",
- machine->root_dir, pid);
+ snprintf(filename, sizeof(filename), "%s/proc/%d/task/%d/maps",
+ machine->root_dir, pid, pid);

fp = fopen(filename, "r");
if (fp == NULL) {
--
2.9.3