Spawning big amount of processes - simgrid

I want to spawn big amount of process. So I have master process which does it.
int master(int argc, char* argv[]){
for (int i = 0; i < 50000; ++i) {
std::string name = std::to_string(i);
MSG_process_create(name.c_str(), slave, NULL, MSG_host_self());
}
return 0;
}
int slave(int argc, char* argv[]){
XBT_INFO("%s", MSG_process_get_name(MSG_process_self()));
return 0;
}
After I launch this program I have the following output:
....
....
[Master:32734:(32736) 0.000000] [master/INFO] 32734
[Master:32735:(32737) 0.000000] [master/INFO] 32735
[0.000000] /home/ken/Downloads/simgrid-master/src/simix/smx_context.cpp:187: [xbt/CRITICAL] Failed to protect stack: Cannot allocate memory
Process finished with exit code 134 (interrupted by signal 6: SIGABRT)
Then I was advised to use contexts/stack-size parameter to change stack-size, because the previous program by default required 50000 * 8192 KiB.
I added this parameter --cfg=contexts/stack-size:10 but I have the same output:
...
...
[Master:32735:(32737) 0.000000] [master/INFO] 32735
[0.000000] /home/ken/Downloads/simgrid-master/src/simix/smx_context.cpp:187: [xbt/CRITICAL] Failed to protect stack: Cannot allocate memory
Process finished with exit code 134 (interrupted by signal 6: SIGABRT)
Or --cfg=contexts/stack-size:100000:
...
...
[Master:32734:(32736) 0.000000] [master/INFO] 32734
[0.000000] /home/ken/Downloads/simgrid-master/src/simix/smx_context.cpp:187: [xbt/CRITICAL] Failed to protect stack: Cannot allocate memory
It might seem that my program doesn't see this parameter, but it isn't the case because stack-parameter is 5 gives me:
Finally, if nothing of the above applies, this can result from a stack overflow.
Try to increase stack size with --cfg=contexts/stack_size (current size is 1 KiB).
What did I do wrong?

can you try maybe increasing the value of the maximum number of mappings allowed per process on your system ?
You can do that with sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=500000 to set the maximum value to 500000
We saw recently that this was causing some issues on some SMPI runs, maybe it's the same on your end. The "Cannot allocate memory" message may indeed be misleading, as the ENOMEM error code is set for various reasons (and according to http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/mprotect.2.html, one of them may be the number of mappings).

Related

system: Resource temporarily unavailable, which one?

I search for answer and so far haven't found a clear one.
I am doing testing which launches many threads calling "system()", like below.
for (int i = 0; i < 3000; ++i)
pthread_create(&thread[i], NULL, thread_func, NULL);
for (int i = 0; i < 3000; ++i)
pthread_join(thread[i], NULL);
...
void* thread_func(void* arg)
{
if (system('test.sh') == -1)
{
perror("system");
exit(1);
}
pthread_exit(NULL);
}
test.sh
#!/bin/bash
sleep 100
When I run the program, at certain point it will display.
system: Resource temporarily unavailable
Is there way to know which resource? I fix the max processes issue so I think it may be due to something else.
This error means that some system call called by the system library function returned EGAIN. Most likely is the fork call, which can fail with EAGAIN for a number of reasons:
EAGAIN A system-imposed limit on the number of threads was encountered. There are a num‐
ber of limits that may trigger this error:
* the RLIMIT_NPROC soft resource limit (set via setrlimit(2)), which limits the
number of processes and threads for a real user ID, was reached;
* the kernel's system-wide limit on the number of processes and threads,
/proc/sys/kernel/threads-max, was reached (see proc(5));
* the maximum number of PIDs, /proc/sys/kernel/pid_max, was reached (see proc(5));
or
* the PID limit (pids.max) imposed by the cgroup "process number" (PIDs) con‐
troller was reached.

How to use proc_pid_cmdline in kernel module

I am writing a kernel module to get the list of pids with their complete process name. The proc_pid_cmdline() gives the complete process name;using same function /proc/*/cmdline gets the complete process name. (struct task_struct) -> comm gives hint of what process it is, but not the complete path.
I have included the function name, but it gives error because it does not know where to find the function.
How to use proc_pid_cmdline() in a module ?
You are not supposed to call proc_pid_cmdline().
It is a non-public function in fs/proc/base.c:
static int proc_pid_cmdline(struct seq_file *m, struct pid_namespace *ns,
struct pid *pid, struct task_struct *task)
However, what it does is simple:
get_cmdline(task, m->buf, PAGE_SIZE);
That is not likely to return the full path though and it will not be possible to determine the full path in every case. The arg[0] value may be overwritten, the file could be deleted or moved, etc. A process may exec() in a way which obscures the original command line, and all kinds of other maladies.
A scan of my Fedora 20 system /proc/*/cmdline turns up all kinds of less-than-useful results:
-F
BUG:
WARNING: at
WARNING: CPU:
INFO: possible recursive locking detecte
ernel BUG at
list_del corruption
list_add corruption
do_IRQ: stack overflow:
ear stack overflow (cur:
eneral protection fault
nable to handle kernel
ouble fault:
RTNL: assertion failed
eek! page_mapcount(page) went negative!
adness at
NETDEV WATCHDOG
ysctl table check failed
: nobody cared
IRQ handler type mismatch
Machine Check Exception:
Machine check events logged
divide error:
bounds:
coprocessor segment overrun:
invalid TSS:
segment not present:
invalid opcode:
alignment check:
stack segment:
fpu exception:
simd exception:
iret exception:
/var/log/messages
--
/usr/bin/abrt-dump-oops
-xtD
I have managed to solve a version of this problem. I wanted to access the cmdline of all PIDs but within the kernel itself (as opposed to a kernel module as the question states), but perhaps these principles can be applied to kernel modules as well?
What I did was, I added the following function to fs/proc/base.c
int proc_get_cmdline(struct task_struct *task, char * buffer) {
int i;
int ret = proc_pid_cmdline(task, buffer);
for(i = 0; i < ret - 1; i++) {
if(buffer[i] == '\0')
buffer[i] = ' ';
}
return 0;
}
I then added the declaration in include/linux/proc_fs.h
int proc_get_cmdline(struct task_struct *, char *);
At this point, I could access the cmdline of all processes within the kernel.
To access the task_struct, perhaps you could refer to kernel: efficient way to find task_struct by pid?.
Once you have the task_struct, you should be able to do something like:
char cmdline[256];
proc_get_cmdline(task, cmdline);
if(strlen(cmdline) > 0)
printk(" cmdline :%s\n", cmdline);
else
printk(" cmdline :%s\n", task->comm);
I was able to obtain the commandline of all processes this way.
To get the full path of the binary behind a process.
char * exepathp;
struct file * exe_file;
struct mm_struct *mm;
char exe_path [1000];
//straight up stolen from get_mm_exe_file
mm = get_task_mm(current);
down_read(&mm->mmap_sem); //lock read
exe_file = mm->exe_file;
if (exe_file) get_file(exe_file);
up_read(&mm->mmap_sem); //unlock read
//reduce exe path to a string
exepathp = d_path( &(exe_file->f_path), exe_path, 1000*sizeof(char) );
Where current is the task struct for the process you are interested in. The variable exepathp gets the string of the full path. This is slightly different than the process cmd, this is the path of binary which was loaded to start the process. Combining this path with the process cmd should give you the full path.

high resource usage program stalls/crashes linux

I have a program that reads about 1000 images and creates a statistical summary of their contents. Each image is processed in its own thread using OpenMP, and I have the thread limit set to match my number of processors.
Until about two weeks ago, the program ran fine. Now, however, if I run the program more than once, my system slows down and eventually freezes up.
In order to troubleshoot, I wrote the simple code listed below that emulates what my program is doing. This code will freeze my system, just as my original program does, after trying to read only a few files at line 35.
I ran the program, successively reverting to an earlier kernel after each failure, and found that it fails with all 3.6 kernels up to version 3.6.8.
However, when I go back to kernel 3.5.6, it works.
test.cc:
1 #include <cstdio>
2 #include <iostream>
3 #include <vector>
4 #include <unistd.h>
5
6 using namespace std;
7
8 int main ()
9 {
10 // number of files
11 const size_t N = 1000;
12 // total system memory
13 const size_t MEM = sysconf (_SC_PHYS_PAGES) * sysconf (_SC_PAGE_SIZE);
14 // file size
15 const size_t SZ = MEM/N;
16
17 // create temp filenames
18 vector<string> fn (N);
19 for (size_t i = 0; i < fn.size (); ++i)
20 fn[i] = string (tmpnam (NULL));
21
22 // write a bunch of files to disk
23 for (size_t i = 0; i < fn.size (); ++i)
24 {
25 vector<char> a (SZ);
26 FILE *fp = fopen (fn[i].c_str (), "wb");
27 fwrite (&a[0], a.size (), 1, fp);
28 clog << fn[i] << " written" << endl;
29 }
30
31 // read a bunch of files from disk
32 #pragma omp parallel for
33 for (size_t i = 0; i < fn.size (); ++i)
34 {
35 vector<char> a (SZ);
36 FILE *fp = fopen (fn[i].c_str (), "rb");
37 fread (&a[0], a.size (), 1, fp);
38 clog << fn[i] << " read" << endl;
39 }
40
41 return 0;
42 }
Makefile:
1 a:$
2 g++ -fopenmp -Wall -o test -g test.cc$
3 ./test$
My question is: What is different about kernel 3.6 that would cause this program to fail, but does not cause it to fail in version 3.5?
Without going through the code, if you want to set some limits to your processes, have a look at cgroups for limiting resource usage.
As for the freezing - you are trying to read/write GBs of data to disk at once. Given the speeds of ~100MB/s of today's hard-drives, I would expect a freeze at the time the kernel decides to flush the caches to the disk - which will probably occur as soon as you try to read a reasonably sized chunk of data from the disk under memory pressure (since you allocated lots of memory, the space for caches is limited).
You can try to mmap() the files or change kernel I/O scheduler.
I haven't look in deep at your code, but I realised some bad practices (at least, I thing they're) :
First, the critical section inside the openmp loop. That is a synchronism point, and putting it in every iteration sounds kind of problematic to me. Since each thread must be sure no other one has entered there, probably the overhead that synchronism introduces increases with the number of threads.
Second: I am not very used to C++, but I guess that every time vector<char> a (SZ) is executed memory is allocated (and freed at the end of the block). Excuse me if I am wrong. Since you know beforehand the value of SZ, you'll better allocate a vector<vector<char> > with as many elements as threads before the parallel region. Then, in the parallel region, you'd make each thread access its vector<char>.

max thread per process in linux

I wrote a simple program to calculate the maximum number of threads that a process can have in linux (Centos 5). here is the code:
int main()
{
pthread_t thrd[400];
for(int i=0;i<400;i++)
{
int err=pthread_create(&thrd[i],NULL,thread,(void*)i);
if(err!=0)
cout << "thread creation failed: " << i <<" error code: " << err << endl;
}
return 0;
}
void * thread(void* i)
{
sleep(100);//make the thread still alive
return 0;
}
I figured out that max number for threads is only 300!? What if i need more than that?
I have to mention that pthread_create returns 12 as error code.
Thanks before
There is a thread limit for linux and it can be modified runtime by writing desired limit to /proc/sys/kernel/threads-max. The default value is computed from the available system memory. In addition to that limit, there's also another limit: /proc/sys/vm/max_map_count which limits the maximum mmapped segments and at least recent kernels will mmap memory per thread. It should be safe to increase that limit a lot if you hit it.
However, the limit you're hitting is lack of virtual memory in 32bit operating system. Install a 64 bit linux if your hardware supports it and you'll be fine. I can easily start 30000 threads with a stack size of 8MB. The system has a single Core 2 Duo + 8 GB of system memory (I'm using 5 GB for other stuff in the same time) and it's running 64 bit Ubuntu with kernel 2.6.32. Note that memory overcommit (/proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory) must be allowed because otherwise system would need at least 240 GB of committable memory (sum of real memory and swap space).
If you need lots of threads and cannot use 64 bit system your only choice is to minimize the memory usage per thread to conserve virtual memory. Start with requesting as little stack as you can live with.
Your system limits may not be allowing you to map the stacks of all the threads you require. Look at /proc/sys/vm/max_map_count, and see this answer. I'm not 100% sure this is your problem, because most people run into problems at much larger thread counts.
I had also encountered the same problem when my number of threads crosses some threshold.
It was because of the user level limit (number of process a user can run at a time) set to 1024 in /etc/security/limits.conf .
so check your /etc/security/limits.conf and look for entry:-
username -/soft/hard -nproc 1024
change it to some larger values to something 100k(requires sudo privileges/root) and it should work for you.
To learn more about security policy ,see http://linux.die.net/man/5/limits.conf.
check the stack size per thread with ulimit, in my case Redhat Linux 2.6:
ulimit -a
...
stack size (kbytes, -s) 10240
Each of your threads will get this amount of memory (10MB) assigned for it's stack. With a 32bit program and a maximum address space of 4GB, that is a maximum of only 4096MB / 10MB = 409 threads !!! Minus program code, minus heap-space will probably lead to your observed max. of 300 threads.
You should be able to raise this by compiling a 64bit application or setting ulimit -s 8192 or even ulimit -s 4096. But if this is advisable is another discussion...
You will run out of memory too unless u shrink the default thread stack size. Its 10MB on our version of linux.
EDIT:
Error code 12 = out of memory, so I think the 1mb stack is still too big for you. Compiled for 32 bit, I can get a 100k stack to give me 30k threads. Beyond 30k threads I get Error code 11 which means no more threads allowed. A 1MB stack gives me about 4k threads before error code 12. 10MB gives me 427 threads. 100MB gives me 42 threads. 1 GB gives me 4... We have 64 bit OS with 64 GB ram. Is your OS 32 bit? When I compile for 64bit, I can use any stack size I want and get the limit of threads.
Also I noticed if i turn the profiling stuff (Tools|Profiling) on for netbeans and run from the ide...I only can get 400 threads. Weird. Netbeans also dies if you use up all the threads.
Here is a test app you can run:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <pthread.h>
#include <signal.h>
// this prevents the compiler from reordering code over this COMPILER_BARRIER
// this doesnt do anything
#define COMPILER_BARRIER() __asm__ __volatile__ ("" ::: "memory")
sigset_t _fSigSet;
volatile int _cActive = 0;
pthread_t thrd[1000000];
void * thread(void *i)
{
int nSig, cActive;
cActive = __sync_fetch_and_add(&_cActive, 1);
COMPILER_BARRIER(); // make sure the active count is incremented before sigwait
// sigwait is a handy way to sleep a thread and wake it on command
sigwait(&_fSigSet, &nSig); //make the thread still alive
COMPILER_BARRIER(); // make sure the active count is decrimented after sigwait
cActive = __sync_fetch_and_add(&_cActive, -1);
//printf("%d(%d) ", i, cActive);
return 0;
}
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
pthread_attr_t attr;
int cThreadRequest, cThreads, i, err, cActive, cbStack;
cbStack = (argc > 1) ? atoi(argv[1]) : 0x100000;
cThreadRequest = (argc > 2) ? atoi(argv[2]) : 30000;
sigemptyset(&_fSigSet);
sigaddset(&_fSigSet, SIGUSR1);
sigaddset(&_fSigSet, SIGSEGV);
printf("Start\n");
pthread_attr_init(&attr);
if ((err = pthread_attr_setstacksize(&attr, cbStack)) != 0)
printf("pthread_attr_setstacksize failed: err: %d %s\n", err, strerror(err));
for (i = 0; i < cThreadRequest; i++)
{
if ((err = pthread_create(&thrd[i], &attr, thread, (void*)i)) != 0)
{
printf("pthread_create failed on thread %d, error code: %d %s\n",
i, err, strerror(err));
break;
}
}
cThreads = i;
printf("\n");
// wait for threads to all be created, although we might not wait for
// all threads to make it through sigwait
while (1)
{
cActive = _cActive;
if (cActive == cThreads)
break;
printf("Waiting A %d/%d,", cActive, cThreads);
sched_yield();
}
// wake em all up so they exit
for (i = 0; i < cThreads; i++)
pthread_kill(thrd[i], SIGUSR1);
// wait for them all to exit, although we might be able to exit before
// the last thread returns
while (1)
{
cActive = _cActive;
if (!cActive)
break;
printf("Waiting B %d/%d,", cActive, cThreads);
sched_yield();
}
printf("\nDone. Threads requested: %d. Threads created: %d. StackSize=%lfmb\n",
cThreadRequest, cThreads, (double)cbStack/0x100000);
return 0;
}

Zero bytes lost in Valgrind

What does it mean when Valgrind reports o bytes lost, like here:
==27752== 0 bytes in 1 blocks are definitely lost in loss record 2 of 1,532
I suspect it is just an artifact from creative use of malloc, but it is good to be sure (-;
EDIT: Of course the real question is whether it can be ignored or it is an effective leak that should be fixed by freeing those buffers.
Yes, this is a real leak, and it should be fixed.
When you malloc(0), malloc may either give you NULL, or an address that is guaranteed to be different from that of any other object.
Since you are likely on Linux, you get the second. There is no space wasted for the allocated buffer itself, but libc has to do some housekeeping, and that does waste space, so you can't go on doing malloc(0) indefinitely.
You can observe it with:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main() {
unsigned long i;
for (i = 0; i < (size_t)-1; ++i) {
void *p = malloc(0);
if (p == NULL) {
fprintf(stderr, "Ran out of memory on %ld iteration\n", i);
break;
}
}
return 0;
}
gcc t.c && bash -c 'ulimit -v 10240 && ./a.out'
Ran out of memory on 202751 iteration
It looks like you allocated a block with 0 size and then didn't subsequently free it.

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