<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <!DOCTYPE chapter SYSTEM "chapter.dtd"> <chapter> <header> <copyright> <year>2001</year><year>2016</year> <holder>Ericsson AB. All Rights Reserved.</holder> </copyright> <legalnotice> Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License. </legalnotice> <title>Profiling</title> <prepared>Ingela Anderton</prepared> <docno></docno> <date>2001-11-02</date> <rev></rev> <file>profiling.xml</file> </header> <section> <title>Do Not Guess About Performance - Profile</title> <p>Even experienced software developers often guess wrong about where the performance bottlenecks are in their programs. Therefore, profile your program to see where the performance bottlenecks are and concentrate on optimizing them.</p> <p>Erlang/OTP contains several tools to help finding bottlenecks:</p> <list type="bulleted"> <item><p><seealso marker="tools:fprof"><c>fprof</c></seealso> provides the most detailed information about where the program time is spent, but it significantly slows down the program it profiles.</p></item> <item><p><seealso marker="tools:eprof"><c>eprof</c></seealso> provides time information of each function used in the program. No call graph is produced, but <c>eprof</c> has considerable less impact on the program it profiles.</p> <p>If the program is too large to be profiled by <c>fprof</c> or <c>eprof</c>, <c>cprof</c> can be used to locate code parts that are to be more thoroughly profiled using <c>fprof</c> or <c>eprof</c>.</p></item> <item><p><seealso marker="tools:cprof"><c>cprof</c></seealso> is the most lightweight tool, but it only provides execution counts on a function basis (for all processes, not per process).</p></item> <item><p><seealso marker="runtime_tools:dbg"><c>dbg</c></seealso> is the generic erlang tracing frontend. By using the <c>timestamp</c> or <c>cpu_timestamp</c> options it can be used to time how long function calls in a live system take.</p></item> <item><p><seealso marker="tools:lcnt"><c>lcnt</c></seealso> is used to find contention points in the Erlang Run-Time System's internal locking mechanisms. It is useful when looking for bottlenecks in interaction between process, port, ets tables and other entities that can be run in parallel.</p></item> </list> <p>The tools are further described in <seealso marker="#profiling_tools">Tools</seealso>.</p> <p>There are also several open source tools outside of Erlang/OTP that can be used to help profiling. Some of them are:</p> <list type="bulleted"> <item><url href="https://github.com/isacssouza/erlgrind">erlgrind</url> can be used to visualize fprof data in kcachegrind.</item> <item><url href="https://github.com/proger/eflame">eflame</url> is an alternative to fprof that displays the profiling output as a flamegraph.</item> <item><url href="https://ferd.github.io/recon/index.html">recon</url> is a collection of Erlang profiling and debugging tools. This tool comes with an accompanying E-book called <url href="https://www.erlang-in-anger.com/">Erlang in Anger</url>.</item> </list> </section> <section> <title>Memory profiling</title> <pre>eheap_alloc: Cannot allocate 1234567890 bytes of memory (of type "heap").</pre> <p>The above slogan is one of the more common reasons for Erlang to terminate. For unknown reasons the Erlang Run-Time System failed to allocate memory to use. When this happens a crash dump is generated that contains information about the state of the system as it ran out of mmeory. Use the <seealso marker="observer:cdv"><c>crashdump_viewer</c></seealso> to get a view of the memory is being used. Look for processes with large heaps or many messages, large ets tables, etc.</p> <p>When looking at memory usage in a running system the most basic function to get information from is <seealso marker="erts:erlang#memory/0"><c> erlang:memory()</c></seealso>. It returns the current memory usage of the system. <seealso marker="tools:instrument"><c>instrument(3)</c></seealso> can be used to get a more detailed breakdown of where memory is used.</p> <p>Processes, ports and ets tables can then be inspecting using their respective info functions, i.e. <seealso marker="erts:erlang#process_info_memory"><c>erlang:process_info/2 </c></seealso>, <seealso marker="erts:erlang#port_info_memory"><c>erlang:port_info/2 </c></seealso> and <seealso marker="stdlib:ets#info/1"><c>ets:info/1</c></seealso>. </p> <p>Sometimes the system can enter a state where the reported memory from <c>erlang:memory(total)</c> is very different from the memory reported by the OS. This can be because of internal fragmentation within the Erlang Run-Time System. Data about how memory is allocated can be retrieved using <seealso marker="erts:erlang#system_info_allocator"> <c>erlang:system_info(allocator)</c></seealso>. The data you get from that function is very raw and not very plesant to read. <url href="http://ferd.github.io/recon/recon_alloc.html">recon_alloc</url> can be used to extract useful information from system_info statistics counters.</p> </section> <section> <title>Large Systems</title> <p>For a large system, it can be interesting to run profiling on a simulated and limited scenario to start with. But bottlenecks have a tendency to appear or cause problems only when many things are going on at the same time, and when many nodes are involved. Therefore, it is also desirable to run profiling in a system test plant on a real target system.</p> <p>For a large system, you do not want to run the profiling tools on the whole system. Instead you want to concentrate on central processes and modules, which contribute for a big part of the execution.</p> <p>There are also some tools that can be used to get a view of the whole system with more or less overhead.</p> <list type="bulleted"> <item><seealso marker="observer:observer"><c>observer</c></seealso> is a GUI tool that can connect to remote nodes and display a variety of information about the running system.</item> <item><seealso marker="observer:etop"><c>etop</c></seealso> is a command line tool that can connect to remote nodes and display information similar to what the UNIX tool top shows.</item> <item><seealso marker="runtime_tools:msacc"><c>msacc</c></seealso> allows the user to get a view of what the Erlang Run-Time system is spending its time doing. Has a very low overhead, which makes it useful to run in heavily loaded systems to get some idea of where to start doing more granular profiling.</item> </list> </section> <section> <title>What to Look For</title> <p>When analyzing the result file from the profiling activity, look for functions that are called many times and have a long "own" execution time (time excluding calls to other functions). Functions that are called a lot of times can also be interesting, as even small things can add up to quite a bit if repeated often. Also ask yourself what you can do to reduce this time. The following are appropriate types of questions to ask yourself:</p> <list type="bulleted"> <item>Is it possible to reduce the number of times the function is called?</item> <item>Can any test be run less often if the order of tests is changed?</item> <item>Can any redundant tests be removed?</item> <item>Does any calculated expression give the same result each time?</item> <item>Are there other ways to do this that are equivalent and more efficient?</item> <item>Can another internal data representation be used to make things more efficient?</item> </list> <p>These questions are not always trivial to answer. Some benchmarks might be needed to back up your theory and to avoid making things slower if your theory is wrong. For details, see <seealso marker="#benchmark">Benchmarking</seealso>.</p> </section> <section> <title>Tools</title> <marker id="profiling_tools"></marker> <section> <title>fprof</title> <p><c>fprof</c> measures the execution time for each function, both own time, that is, how much time a function has used for its own execution, and accumulated time, that is, including called functions. The values are displayed per process. You also get to know how many times each function has been called.</p> <p><c>fprof</c> is based on trace to file to minimize runtime performance impact. Using <c>fprof</c> is just a matter of calling a few library functions, see the <seealso marker="tools:fprof">fprof</seealso> manual page in Tools.</p> </section> <section> <title>eprof</title> <p><c>eprof</c> is based on the Erlang <c>trace_info</c> BIFs. <c>eprof</c> shows how much time has been used by each process, and in which function calls this time has been spent. Time is shown as percentage of total time and absolute time. For more information, see the <seealso marker="tools:eprof">eprof</seealso> manual page in Tools.</p> </section> <section> <title>cprof</title> <p><c>cprof</c> is something in between <c>fprof</c> and <c>cover</c> regarding features. It counts how many times each function is called when the program is run, on a per module basis. <c>cprof</c> has a low performance degradation effect (compared with <c>fprof</c>) and does not need to recompile any modules to profile (compared with <c>cover</c>). For more information, see the <seealso marker="tools:cprof">cprof</seealso> manual page in Tools.</p> </section> <section> <title>Tool Summary</title> <table> <row> <cell><em>Tool</em></cell> <cell><em>Results</em></cell> <cell><em>Size of Result</em></cell> <cell><em>Effects on Program Execution Time</em></cell> <cell><em>Records Number of Calls</em></cell> <cell><em>Records Execution Time</em></cell> <cell><em>Records Called by</em></cell> <cell><em>Records Garbage Collection</em></cell> </row> <row> <cell><c>fprof</c></cell> <cell>Per process to screen/file</cell> <cell>Large</cell> <cell>Significant slowdown</cell> <cell>Yes</cell> <cell>Total and own</cell> <cell>Yes</cell> <cell>Yes</cell> </row> <row> <cell><c>eprof</c></cell> <cell>Per process/function to screen/file</cell> <cell>Medium</cell> <cell>Small slowdown</cell> <cell>Yes</cell> <cell>Only total</cell> <cell>No</cell> <cell>No</cell> </row> <row> <cell><c>cprof</c></cell> <cell>Per module to caller</cell> <cell>Small</cell> <cell>Small slowdown</cell> <cell>Yes</cell> <cell>No</cell> <cell>No</cell> <cell>No</cell> </row> <tcaption>Tool Summary</tcaption> </table> </section> <section> <title>dbg</title> <p><c>dbg</c> is a generic Erlang trace tool. By using the <c>timestamp</c> or <c>cpu_timestamp</c> options it can be used as a precision instrument to profile how long time a function call takes for a specific process. This can be very useful when trying to understand where time is spent in a heavily loaded system as it is possible to limit the scope of what is profiled to be very small. For more information, see the <seealso marker="runtime_tools:dbg">dbg</seealso> manual page in Runtime Tools.</p> </section> <section> <title>lcnt</title> <p><c>lcnt</c> is used to profile interactions inbetween entities that run in parallel. For example if you have a process that all other processes in the system needs to interact with (maybe it has some global configuration), then <c>lcnt</c> can be used to figure out if the interaction with that process is a problem.</p> <p>In the Erlang Run-time System entities are only run in parallel when there are multiple schedulers. Therefore <c>lcnt</c> will show more contention points (and thus be more useful) on systems using many schedulers on many cores.</p> <p>For more information, see the <seealso marker="tools:lcnt">lcnt</seealso> manual page in Tools.</p> </section> </section> <section> <marker id="benchmark"></marker> <title>Benchmarking</title> <p>The main purpose of benchmarking is to find out which implementation of a given algorithm or function is the fastest. Benchmarking is far from an exact science. Today's operating systems generally run background tasks that are difficult to turn off. Caches and multiple CPU cores does not facilitate benchmarking. It would be best to run UNIX computers in single-user mode when benchmarking, but that is inconvenient to say the least for casual testing.</p> <p>Benchmarks can measure wall-clock time or CPU time.</p> <list type="bulleted"> <item><seealso marker="stdlib:timer#tc/3">timer:tc/3</seealso> measures wall-clock time. The advantage with wall-clock time is that I/O, swapping, and other activities in the operating system kernel are included in the measurements. The disadvantage is that the measurements vary a lot. Usually it is best to run the benchmark several times and note the shortest time, which is to be the minimum time that is possible to achieve under the best of circumstances.</item> <item><seealso marker="erts:erlang#statistics/1">statistics/1</seealso> with argument <c>runtime</c> measures CPU time spent in the Erlang virtual machine. The advantage with CPU time is that the results are more consistent from run to run. The disadvantage is that the time spent in the operating system kernel (such as swapping and I/O) is not included. Therefore, measuring CPU time is misleading if any I/O (file or socket) is involved.</item> </list> <p>It is probably a good idea to do both wall-clock measurements and CPU time measurements.</p> <p>Some final advice:</p> <list type="bulleted"> <item>The granularity of both measurement types can be high. Therefore, ensure that each individual measurement lasts for at least several seconds.</item> <item>To make the test fair, each new test run is to run in its own, newly created Erlang process. Otherwise, if all tests run in the same process, the later tests start out with larger heap sizes and therefore probably do fewer garbage collections. Also consider restarting the Erlang emulator between each test.</item> <item>Do not assume that the fastest implementation of a given algorithm on computer architecture X is also the fastest on computer architecture Y.</item> </list> </section> </chapter>