On Windows plan there is an option to take a memory dump:
However, this option is missing on Linux plan:
The option which is available for App Services on Linux is not available for Azure Functions on Linux.
Is there a way to get memory dumps for Azure Functions on Linux?
Is there a way to get memory dumps for Azure Functions on Linux?
After researching in my local environment came to a conclusion that we can't take memory dump in Azure Functions with the Linux platform.
And as per the below mentioned answer from Microsoft and many other documents provides only information about memory dump with Windows Platform.
So, I would even suggest you raise a feature request so that it would be helpful for the other members with related issue.
Related
I'm trying to move some computations to Azure cloud services. One of the steps of the workflow I'm trying to implement includes running a Win32 desktop application generating a file. Obviously, we cannot have a user interaction for cloud calculations, so the application is launched with command line arguments. The process starts, generates a file, and then exists. At the moment I cannot refactor the code and move this functionality to command-line windowless utility.
First, I chose Azure Functions because they are intended for event-driven short calculations, and that's exactly what I need. Also they are cheap. But I encountered a problem that processes in Azure Functions are being executed inside a sandbox blocking User32/GDI32 system calls and thus preventing me from launching desktop applications.
Another solution I came up with is mounting a virtual machine drive with all needed Visual C++ redistributables installed and then using Azure Batch with nodes based on the pre-configured drive. But this solution has another drawbacks, since it takes minutes to mount a new node. Of course, I could have some nodes that are always active, but anyway the further scaling is slow and having active nodes is not so cheap. Also I have a feeling that Azure Batch is a bit overkill, because there is no need for HPC in my case. Azure Functions' computation capabilities are enough for me.
Is there some kind of compromise solution? So that I would have a solution with fast scaling and quick responses, but with no need to establish Azure Batch based on Azure Virtual Machines?
A lot of GDI32 calls are available now but in a containerized form.
So, you can deploy a function with the desktop application but inside a docker container.
Refer the following articlefor more explanation.
Refer the following documentation on how to deploy containerized function.
I just switched from Windows plan to Linux on Azure Function App and memory usage went up 5 times.
I didn't change the way how package is built. And it is just dotnet publish -c Release --no-build --no-restore. I wonder if I could do sotmething here - build for specific runtime?
Is there a way to decrease that consumption? I'm wondering because my plan was to switch all functions to Linux plans as they are cheaper, but not neceserilly if it ends up in higher plans.
Few details:
dotnet 3.1
function runtime version ~3
functions run in-process
The function is rarely used, so there is no correlation between higher memory usage and bigger traffic.
Please check if my findings are helpful:
Memory Working Set is the Current amount of memory used by the Function App in MB's or the tracking how much of the application is currently loaded in physical memory.
If the requests are high, then the Memory working set is most likely to increase.
AFAIK, during the initial start/request or cold start of the Azure Function takes high memory consumption ranges nearly 60 MiB - 180 MiB and the net memory working set count depends on the amount of physical memory is using by our function application during requests and response time.
According to Azure Functions Plan Migration Official documentation, direct migration to a Dedicated (App Service) plan in not supported currently and this migration is not supported on Linux.
Also, you can check the cause and resolution on Azure Functions (Linux Plan) > Diagnose and Solve Problems > Availability & Performance >
What I am trying to achieve is similar to what you can see in mongo-azure repo, specifically, I want to write Azure Diagnostic Configuration File in such a way so that I can get all the instances of performance counters, for example
\Processor(*)\% Processor Time
and it doesn't seem to be working - no data is visible in the table in my storage account.
Is it achievable at all with configuration, and if so, how?
UPD: We were able to get this working for a simple single VM (so it is possible!), but for some reason it still doesn't work for VMs in VMSS where Service Fabric Cluster is running
UPD #2: We did upgrade to VS 2015 tools 1.5 and now it magically works. I am not really sure if that was the root cause problem or we screwed up anywhere else.
Is it achievable at all with configuration, and if so, how?
Based on the documentation here, it seems it is not possible. From this link:
Performance counters available for Microsoft Azure
Azure provides a subset of the performance counters available for
Windows Server, IIS and the ASP.NET stack. The following table lists
some of the performance counters of particular interest for Azure
applications.
Table that follows below only includes Processor(_Total).
This is possible. We do this in CloudMonix when monitoring VMSS and it is working.
How are you instrumenting Diagnostics and which tables are you looking at?
Specifying \LogicalDisk(*)\Available Megabytes yileds all drives and their free space, for example
At the moment we are running our application on an AWS Beanstalk but are trying to determine the suitablilty of Azure.
Our biggest issue is the amount of wasted CPU time we are paying for but not using. We are running on t2.small instances as these have the min amount of RAM we need but we never use even the base amount of CPU time allotted. (20% for a t2.small ) We need lots of CPU power during short bursts of the day and bringing more instances on line in advance of this is the only way we can handle it.
AWS Lambda looks a good solution for us but we have dependencies on Windows components like SAPI so we have to run inside of Windows VMs.
Looking at Azure cloud services we thought using a Web role would be best fit for our app but it seems a Web role is nothing more than a Win 2012 VM with IIS enabled. So as the app scales it just brings on more of these VMs which is exactly what we have at the moment. Does Azure have a service similar to Lambda where you just pay for the CPU processing time you use?
The reason for our inefficient use of CPU resources is that our speech generation app uses lost of 3rd party voices but can only run single threaded when calling into SAPI because the voice engine is prone to crashing when multithreading. We have no control over this voice engine. It must have access to a system registry and Windows SAPI so the ideal solution is to somehow wrap all dependencies is a package and deploy this onto Azure and then kick off multiple instances of this. What "this" is I have no Idea
Microsoft just announced a new serverless compute service as an alternative to AWS Lambda, called Azure Functions:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/functions/
http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-releases-preview-of-new-azure-serverless-compute-service-to-take-on-aws-lambda/
With Azure Functions you only pay for what you use with compute metered to the nearest 100ms at Per/GB price based on the time your function runs and the memory size of the function space you choose. Function space size can range from 128mb to 1536mb. With the first 400k GB/Sec free.
Azure Function requests are charged per million requests, with the first 1 million requests free.
Based on the documentation on Azure website here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/campaigns/azure-vs-aws/mapping/, the services equivalent to AWS Lambda are Web Jobs and Logic Apps.
The most direct equivalent of Lambda on Azure is Azure Automation which does a lot of what Lambda does except it runs Powershell instead of Node etc. It isn't as tightly integrated into other services like Lambda is, but it has the same model. i.e. you write a script, and it is executed on demand.
I presume by SAPI you are refering to the speech API? If so you can create Powershell modules for Azure, and they can include dll files. In which case you could create a module to wrap around the SAPI dll, and that should do what you are looking for.
If you want a full compute environment, without the complexity of multiple machines when you run. You could use Azure Batch which would be the Azure recommended way of running what you are looking for.
The cost benefit you need to evaluate would be how much quicker your solution would run against a native .net stack (in batch), and if performance is significantly degraded when run from Powershell.
Personally I would give Automation a try, it is surprisingly powerful.
There is something called "Cloud Service" in azure which allows you to run code on a pure VM. Scaling options on these include such things as CPU%, queue size, etc. If you can schedule your needs, Azure allows you to easily set up a scheduled scaler, i.e. 4 VM's from 8AM until 08:10AM, and of course, in Azure, you pay by the minute, so it could be a feasible solution.
I'd say more, but the documentation in Azure is really so great that I'd be offending them by offering my "translation" here. Checkout azure.com for more info :)
Is there a way to enable Performance Counters to monitor Node.js application performance in Windows Azure?
I haven't experimented with it myself yet, but there is node-perfmon which is a wrapper around typeperf. That says it allows you to write performance counters, as well as simple memory / cpu monitoring. Is this the sort of monitoring you were looking for?
Just adding more to above answers..
For application stats monitoring on Node.js you can use Hummingbird. It supports status over http so you can integrate the code in your node.js app add one port to get the monitoring data over HTTP. No need to use Azure Storage Diagnostics and all info in real time in same machine. It's still in pre-alfa, but is handling with few tasks really well.
http://projects.nuttnet.net/hummingbird/
I know about the node.js "monitor" plugin which is the best for Linux machines for system specific performance and also use HTTP to provide system specific data. I am not sure if that can be ported to Windows Server but if can that is one great choice. Read more about monitor usage here:
http://www.sys-con.com/node/2275314
You may want to also look at these, they aren't directly using perfmon, but allow you to monitor the performance of your Node.js server:
http://search.npmjs.org/#/Probes.js
http://search.npmjs.org/#/nodetime
The NPM registry is a great tool for finding Node.js packages.