Re: [PATCH 00/40] Memory allocation profiling

Kent Overstreet
2023-05-03T17:45:22Z

On Wed, May 03, 2023 at 06:35:49AM -1000, Tejun Heo wrote:
> Hello, Kent.
>
> On Wed, May 03, 2023 at 04:05:08AM -0400, Kent Overstreet wrote:
> > No, we're still waiting on the tracing people to _demonstrate_, not
> > claim, that this is at all possible in a comparable way with tracing.
>
> So, we (meta) happen to do stuff like this all the time in the fleet to hunt
> down tricky persistent problems like memory leaks, ref leaks, what-have-you.
> In recent kernels, with kprobe and BPF, our ability to debug these sorts of
> problems has improved a great deal. Below, I'm attaching a bcc script I used
> to hunt down, IIRC, a double vfree. It's not exactly for a leak but leaks
> can follow the same pattern.
>
> There are of course some pros and cons to this approach:
>
> Pros:
>
> * The framework doesn't really have any runtime overhead, so we can have it
> deployed in the entire fleet and debug wherever problem is.
>
> * It's fully flexible and programmable which enables non-trivial filtering
> and summarizing to be done inside kernel w/ BPF as necessary, which is
> pretty handy for tracking high frequency events.
>
> * BPF is pretty performant. Dedicated built-in kernel code can do better of
> course but BPF's jit compiled code & its data structures are fast enough.
> I don't remember any time this was a problem.

You're still going to have the inherent overhead a separate index of
outstanding memory allocations, so that frees can be decremented to the
correct callsite.

The BPF approach is going to be _way_ higher overhead if you try to use
it as a general profiler, like this is.