4.4. Identifying Contended User-Space Locks
This section describes how to identify contended user-space locks throughout the system within a specific time period. The ability to identify contended user-space locks can help you investigate hangs that you suspect may be caused by
futex
contentions.
Simply put, a
futex
contention occurs when multiple processes are trying to access the same region of memory. In some cases, this can result in a deadlock between the processes in contention, thereby appearing as an application hang.
To do this, 例 4.34 “futexes.stp” probes the
futex
system call.
例 4.34. futexes.stp
#! /usr/bin/env stap # This script tries to identify contended user-space locks by hooking # into the futex system call. global thread_thislock # short global thread_blocktime # global FUTEX_WAIT = 0 /*, FUTEX_WAKE = 1 */ global lock_waits # long-lived stats on (tid,lock) blockage elapsed time global process_names # long-lived pid-to-execname mapping probe syscall.futex { if (op != FUTEX_WAIT) next # don't care about WAKE event originator t = tid () process_names[pid()] = execname() thread_thislock[t] = $uaddr thread_blocktime[t] = gettimeofday_us() } probe syscall.futex.return { t = tid() ts = thread_blocktime[t] if (ts) { elapsed = gettimeofday_us() - ts lock_waits[pid(), thread_thislock[t]] <<< elapsed delete thread_blocktime[t] delete thread_thislock[t] } } probe end { foreach ([pid+, lock] in lock_waits) printf ("%s[%d] lock %p contended %d times, %d avg us\n", process_names[pid], pid, lock, @count(lock_waits[pid,lock]), @avg(lock_waits[pid,lock])) }
例 4.34 “futexes.stp” needs to be manually stopped; upon exit, it prints the following information:
- Name and ID of the process responsible for a contention
- The region of memory it contested
- How many times the region of memory was contended
- Average time of contention throughout the probe
例 4.35 “例 4.34 “futexes.stp” Sample Output” contains an excerpt from the output of 例 4.34 “futexes.stp” upon exiting the script (after approximately 20 seconds).
例 4.35. 例 4.34 “futexes.stp” Sample Output
[...] automount[2825] lock 0x00bc7784 contended 18 times, 999931 avg us synergyc[3686] lock 0x0861e96c contended 192 times, 101991 avg us synergyc[3758] lock 0x08d98744 contended 192 times, 101990 avg us synergyc[3938] lock 0x0982a8b4 contended 192 times, 101997 avg us [...]