perf and DWARF and fork()

April 10, 2020

Tl;DR

If you wonder why perf record -g does not collect nice callstacks for your prorgams try perf record -g --call-graph=dwarf instead.

Case study

Simple example:

$ perf record -F 99 -g -- \
    /usr/lib/llvm/10/bin/clang -w -x c++ -std=c++1z -O0 -fstrict-aliasing -c A.cpp.c -o A.o
$ perf report
   Children      Self  Command  Shared Object        Symbol
+   35,83%     0,00%  clang    [unknown]            [.] 0000000000000000
+   17,71%     0,00%  clang    [unknown]            [.] 0x0000441f0f000000
+    4,86%     0,00%  clang    [unknown]            [.] 0x0000000100000007
+    4,86%     0,00%  clang    [unknown]            [.] 0x000055ca7ceacc30
+    4,17%     0,00%  clang    [unknown]            [.] 0x48487f8d48fd8948
+    3,59%     0,00%  clang    [unknown]            [.] 0x3de907894810c083
+    3,23%     0,00%  clang    libclang-cpp.so.10   [.] clang::VarDecl::~VarDecl
+    3,03%     0,21%  clang    libclang-cpp.so.10   [.] clang::TreeTransform<(anonymous namespace)::TemplateInstantiator>::TransformNestedNameSpecifierLoc
+    2,88%     0,28%  clang    libclang-cpp.so.10   [.] clang::TreeTransform<(anonymous namespace)::TemplateInstantiator>::TransformTemplateSpecializationType

This does not look very useful. Top 6 are cryptic addresses.

It’s because perf uses frame pointer unwinding by default. gcc’s -O2 optimization level avoids them (-fomit-frame-pointer) to generate shorter entry/exit code.

Luckily basic debugging information has a way to encode equivalent information using DWARF format. perf knows how to unwind DWARF using call stack snapshots with –call-graph=dwarf:

$ perf record -F 99 -g --call-graph=dwarf -- \
    /usr/lib/llvm/10/bin/clang -w -x c++ -std=c++1z -O0 -fstrict-aliasing -c A.cpp.c -o A.o
$ perf report
  Children      Self  Command  Shared Object        Symbol
+   11,12%     0,00%  clang    libclang-cpp.so.10   [.] (anonymous namespace)::EmitAssemblyHelper::EmitAssembly
+   11,03%     0,00%  clang    libLLVM-10.so        [.] llvm::legacy::PassManagerImpl::run
+    9,70%     0,09%  clang    libLLVM-10.so        [.] llvm::FPPassManager::runOnFunction
+    9,61%     0,00%  clang    libLLVM-10.so        [.] llvm::FPPassManager::runOnModule
+    7,00%     0,00%  clang    libLLVM-10.so        [.] 0x00007fb266cc6d56
+    5,25%     0,00%  clang    [unknown]            [.] 0xffffffffffffffff
+    4,00%     1,87%  clang    libLLVM-10.so        [.] llvm::FoldingSetBase::FindNodeOrInsertPos
+    3,86%     0,12%  clang    libLLVM-10.so        [.] llvm::SelectionDAGISel::runOnMachineFunction
+    3,86%     0,00%  clang    libLLVM-10.so        [.] 0x00007fb268996715

Most symbols are resolved now and seem to match reality.

The trick is to build profiled binaries (and their shared libraries) at least with -g1 compiler flags. (Something like CFLAGS=”-O2 -g1” / CXXFLAGS=”-O2 -g1”. Note: -g is equivalent to -g2 and contains all that -g1 has. -g1 is the minimum level to get stack unwinding working.

In Gentoo I’m using the following setup to build a few packages with extra debugging:

# cat /etc/portage/env/debug1.conf
CFLAGS="${CFLAGS} -g1"
CXXFLAGS="${CXXFLAGS} -g1"

FEATURES="${FEATURES} splitdebug"
HCFLAGS="${HCFLAGS} -g1"

# needs debugedit
FEATURES="${FEATURES} installsources"

# cat /etc/portage/package.env/debug
sys-libs/glibc     debug1.conf
...
sys-devel/clang    debug1.conf

Real example

Now let’s try to profile something more heavyweight than clang, namely bash. Example is taken from https://bugs.gentoo.org/688922 bug. There texlive-module-collection-fontsextra package unpacks quickly (within a minute) and then hangs up for 20 minutes doing something.

To try to figure out what that something is I ran unpack process in one terminal, waited when unpacking finishes, and then ran perf sampling for a few seconds:

# in one terminal
$ ebuild texlive-fontsextra-2019.ebuild unpack
...
>>> Unpacking texlive-module-collection-fontsextra-2019.tar.xz to /tmp/portage/dev-texlive/texlive-fontsextra-2019/work
<seems to have hung>

# in another, after unpacking is seemingly done
root # perf record -a -g --call-graph=dwarf
# wait ~3 seconds, Ctrl-C
^C[ perf record: Woken up 1000 times to write data ]
[ perf record: Captured and wrote 257,906 MB perf.data (35102 samples) ]

# perf report
   Children      Self  Command          Shared Object       Symbol
+   18,86%     0,12%  ebuild.sh        [kernel.kallsyms]   [k] entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe
+   18,56%     1,21%  ebuild.sh        [kernel.kallsyms]   [k] do_syscall_64
+   13,13%     0,00%  swapper          [kernel.kallsyms]   [k] secondary_startup_64
+   13,13%     0,00%  swapper          [kernel.kallsyms]   [k] cpu_startup_entry
+   13,13%     0,02%  swapper          [kernel.kallsyms]   [k] do_idle
+   12,48%     0,01%  swapper          [kernel.kallsyms]   [k] cpuidle_enter
+   12,47%     0,03%  swapper          [kernel.kallsyms]   [k] cpuidle_enter_state
+   11,92%     0,01%  swapper          [kernel.kallsyms]   [k] intel_idle
+   11,89%    11,89%  swapper          [kernel.kallsyms]   [k] mwait_idle_with_hints.constprop.0
+    7,71%     0,00%  ebuild.sh        libc-2.31.so        [.] __GI_munmap (inlined)
+    6,76%     0,04%  ebuild.sh        [kernel.kallsyms]   [k] __x64_sys_munmap
+    6,72%     0,05%  ebuild.sh        [kernel.kallsyms]   [k] __vm_munmap
+    6,68%     0,04%  dirname          [kernel.kallsyms]   [k] entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe
+    6,55%     0,17%  ebuild.sh        [kernel.kallsyms]   [k] __do_munmap
+    6,54%     0,55%  dirname          [kernel.kallsyms]   [k] do_syscall_64
+    5,31%     0,00%  ebuild.sh        libc-2.31.so        [.] __GI___mmap64 (inlined)
+    5,19%     0,04%  ebuild.sh        [kernel.kallsyms]   [k] page_fault
+    4,74%     0,68%  ebuild.sh        libsandbox.so       [.] malloc

To make sense out of this data I used @brendangregg’s FlameGraph tools (https://github.com/brendangregg/FlameGraph). I generated interactive .svg files as:

$ perf script > out.perf
$ ~/dev/git/FlameGraph/stackcollapse-perf.pl out.perf > out.folded
$ ~/dev/git/FlameGraph/flamegraph.pl out.folded > out.svg

And got this result (clickable and interactive!):

Most of profile is unrelated to our ebuild run and CPU time is spent on unrelated tasks. I could have used perf record -p $pid -g –call-graph=dwarf but I’d like to make sure there is no background kernel (or userspace IPC) activity that is not a part of ebuild process.

Here is what we see right above the all bar:

~5% of CPU is taken by firefox playing video (Audio, Compositor, Media, Web_Content bars)
~9% dirname program
~27% ebuild.sh program
~29% emerge program (unrelated to ebuild.sh)
~3% perf itself
~22% swapper (idle)

Now clicking at ebuild.sh we see that all the time is spent preparing for fork()/exec() (malloc(), mmap(), munmap()).

Surprisingly (or not that surprising if you are familiar with memory allocators) munmap() is the heaviest operation here. The actual external program being executed is dirname!

Looking at texlive-fontsextra-2019.ebuild definition dirname calls happen at https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/eclass/texlive-module.eclass#n140. Here is the relevant code snippet:

texlive-module_src_unpack() {
    unpack ${A}

    grep RELOC tlpkg/tlpobj/* | awk '{print $2}' | sed 's#^RELOC/##' > "${T}/reloclist" || die
    { for i in $(<"${T}/reloclist"); do  dirname ${i}; done; } | uniq > "${T}/dirlist"
    for i in $(<"${T}/dirlist"); do
        if [[ ! -d ${RELOC_TARGET}/${i} ]]; then
            mkdir -p "${RELOC_TARGET}/${i}" || die
        fi
    done
    for i in $(<"${T}/reloclist"); do
        mv "${i}" "${RELOC_TARGET}"/$(dirname "${i}") || die "failed to relocate ${i} to ${RELOC_TARGET}/$(dirname ${i})"
    done
}

reloclist contains 71000 lines. Here dirname happens to be an external tool from coreutils. It’s implementation removes everything after last trailing slash:

The first workaround is to implement simplified version of it in bash assuming that paths are already normalized in reloclist:

# faster than external 'dirname' binary
dirname() {
    echo "${1%/*}"
}

Here is the result of system-wide profile after the change:

dirname binary disappeared completely and mv popped up (don’t mind unrelated cc1plus binary). That means we are in the second for loop of texlive-module_src_unpack() bash function.

The dirname() shell builtin we just added allows cutting down unpack time from 17 minutes to 11 minutes (1.5x speedup).

We can also shrink mv process creations overhead down to one per target directory:

--- a/eclass/texlive-module.eclass
+++ b/eclass/texlive-module.eclass
@@ -137,18 +137,22 @@ S="${WORKDIR}"

 RELOC_TARGET=texmf-dist

+dirname() {
+       echo "${1%/*}"
+}
+
 texlive-module_src_unpack() {
        unpack ${A}

        grep RELOC tlpkg/tlpobj/* | awk '{print $2}' | sed 's#^RELOC/##' > "${T}/reloclist" || die
-       { for i in $(<"${T}/reloclist"); do  dirname ${i}; done; } | uniq > "${T}/dirlist"
+       { for i in $(<"${T}/reloclist"); do  dirname ${i}; done; } | sort | uniq > "${T}/dirlist"
        for i in $(<"${T}/dirlist"); do
                if [[ ! -d ${RELOC_TARGET}/${i} ]]; then
                        mkdir -p "${RELOC_TARGET}/${i}" || die
                fi
        done
-       for i in $(<"${T}/reloclist"); do
-               mv "${i}" "${RELOC_TARGET}"/$(dirname "${i}") || die "failed to relocate ${i} to ${RELOC_TARGET}/$(dirname ${i})"
+       for i in $(<"${T}/dirlist"); do
+               mv $(egrep "^${i}/[^/]+$" "${T}/reloclist") "${RELOC_TARGET}/${i}/" || die "failed to relocate to ${RELOC_TARGET}/${i}"
        done
 }

That cuts it further down from 11 minutes to 30 seconds. That is 22x speedup from previous state, 34x from initial state.

While it’s not the best solution I think it’s a good enough proof of concept to get the idea what gains we can potentially have here.

Better solution would probably be a perl or python one-liner to perform similar mass mkdir/mv. It would also eliminate rest of per-directory fork()s we still have. Should be doable in 20 minutes!

Fork speed

I always wondered what is the actual overhead of fork()/exec() sequence. I would love it to be a function of target process size (or even better be a small constant). But what does happen in reality?

Kernel has to copy much of process’ metadata anyway. At the very least all the page tables have to be copied. These are visible in above perf graphs if we click through: sbuild.sh > __libc__fork > … _do_fork > copy_process > copy_page_range.

We can double-check copy_page_range() definition.

But maybe it’s a negligible part of normal system operation? Let’ get some intuition by looking at a simple benchmark.

Benchmark will gradually increase host bash process size with environment variables and check fork()/exec() performance on a tiny /bin/true binary.

We measure 1000 runs of a small /bin/true binary out of a big process.

$ for env_mb in 0 1 10 100 250 500 1000; do
    env_var=$(python -c "print('A'*1024*1024*$env_mb);")
    echo "Benchmarking $env_mb MB"
    time { for i in `seq 1 1000`; do /bin/true; done; }
done

Benchmarking 0 MB
real 0m0,571s user 0m0,302s sys 0m0,326s

Benchmarking 1 MB
real 0m0,648s user 0m 0,327s sys 0m0,379s

Benchmarking 10 MB
real 0m1,099s user 0m0,285s sys 0m0,871s

Benchmarking 100 MB
real 0m3,223s user 0m0,162s sys 0m3,112s

Benchmarking 250 MB
real 0m12,777s user 0m0,192s sys 0m12,635s

Benchmarking 500 MB
real 0m23,782s user 0m0,202s sys 0m23,632s

Benchmarking 1000 MB
real 0m45,248s user 0m0,203s sys 0m45,097s

fork()/exec() performance degrades quickly (linear) with host process size. It starts from 500 microseconds on a default interactive bash process and degrades down to 45 milliseconds on a 1GB process (100x slowdown).

bash process size also relates to our original example: in case of texlive-module.eclass eclass the expression

$(<"${T}/reloclist")

pulls in 4MB file into bash process. That alone slows process creation down at least by half.

Something like:

while read ...; do
    ...
done < "${T}/reloclist"

would probably make it 50% faster.

Parting words

perf is not that complicated to use. Give it a try!
perf record -g --call-graph=dwarf can extract call stacks from optimized binaries.
Flame graphs are nice :)
Process fork()/exec() is not cheap and spends most of time creating and destroying page tables. Eliminating heavyweight process creation can easily be a 30x performance speedup.
bash should consider using vfork() and/or posix_spawn() (I assume it does not yet do it).

Have fun!