Re: [PATCH 1/1] perf,tools: add time out to force stop endless mmap processing

[David Ahern <dsahern@gmail.com>]

On 6/16/15 9:11 AM, Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo wrote:
> Then, that being said, having a sane upper limit on the time for
> processing those events makes the tool more robust and allows it to do
> most of its work, just samples for the maps not synthesized will fail to
> get resolved to symbols/DSOs.

If you are going to use timeouts then you need a sane upper limit on 
walking /proc altogether as well. i.e, one time limit for individual 
proc files (ie, time limit per task), and one for all of /proc (i.e, 
time limit for all of synthesized_threads). What is a reasonable time 
limit for each? Will it be configurable or hardcoded?

If perf aborts data collection for either a case the user should get a 
warning.

>
> For those cases we should, during synthesizing, do both what Kan did in
> his patch, i.e. emit a log warning with the COMM/PID that we are
> truncating /proc/PID/maps parsing, and increment a counter that, just
> after we finish synthesizing we should report, in a similar way as we
> do in perf_session__warn_about_errors() after processing events,
> something like:
>
>          +--------------------------------------------------------+
>          | %d map information files for pre-existing threads were |
>          | not processed, if there are samples for addresses they |
>          | will not be resolved, you may find out which are these |
>          | threads by running with -v and redirecting the output  |
>          | to a file.                                             |
>          +--------------------------------------------------------+
>
> Ideally, as an extra step, we could flip a flag on the 'struct thread'
> where these maps got truncated and add some visual cue to the
> hist_entry instances (lines in the top UI).
>
> Perhaps we should add a per-thread-proc-map-processing timeout parameter
> to the synthesizing routines instead of having that hardcoded, i.e.
> allow the tool to specify what is reasonable for it, but that wouldn't
> be strictly required for a first patch, emitting the dialog box above
> after synthesizing, if truncation happened, is.
>
> Agreed?

And then report side there should be a warning as well (record can be 
done by one person and analysis by another).

David