Posts

    Saturday 26 October 2013

    Performance modelling of a linux system using fork bomb


    Today I will be showing you a simple way to measure the memory allocation capacity of the system.

    Unlike in case of httpperf my method doesn't rely on the network based requests to load the system

    I will be loading the system with processes by running a shell script in each of the guest operating systems(If the system under test is a server virtualized system) The shell scripts can be controlled remotely using telnet.

    I would like to measure active memory, free memory, swap memory, inactive memory while loading the system with processes.

    The idea here is to get all the required performance metrics from /proc/meminfo while forking processes. For example at one particular instance on my system
    /proc/meminfo:



    MemTotal:        2945376 kB
    MemFree:          765960 kB
    Buffers:          144004 kB
    Cached:           993792 kB
    SwapCached:            0 kB
    Active:           979460 kB
    Inactive:         995496 kB
    Active(anon):     838076 kB
    Inactive(anon):   178496 kB
    Active(file):     141384 kB
    Inactive(file):   817000 kB
    Unevictable:          84 kB
    Mlocked:              84 kB
    SwapTotal:       6261756 kB
    SwapFree:        6261756 kB
    Dirty:               800 kB
    Writeback:             0 kB
    AnonPages:        837144 kB
    Mapped:           213612 kB
    Shmem:            179416 kB
    Slab:              91864 kB
    SReclaimable:      60272 kB
    SUnreclaim:        31592 kB
    KernelStack:        4000 kB
    PageTables:        39688 kB
    NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
    Bounce:                0 kB
    WritebackTmp:          0 kB
    CommitLimit:     7734444 kB
    Committed_AS:    4186924 kB
    VmallocTotal:   34359738367 kB
    VmallocUsed:      556904 kB
    VmallocChunk:   34359177692 kB
    HardwareCorrupted:     0 kB
    AnonHugePages:         0 kB
    HugePages_Total:       0
    HugePages_Free:        0
    HugePages_Rsvd:        0
    HugePages_Surp:        0
    Hugepagesize:       2048 kB
    DirectMap4k:       63488 kB
    DirectMap2M:     2942976 kB
    =======

    Also If we want to track any process, the folder /proc has details about each and every process running on the system.

    Regarding loading the system:

    There are two types of loads . Linear load  and Exponential load
    In linear load, one process forks another process and waits for it to exit. The spawned process forks another process and waits for its child to exit. This keeps going on and on till the system eventually fails. To load the system with linear load we ran the following shell script:

    #!/bin/bash
    $0 &
    wait

    "$0 &" will run the same script in the background and 'wait' will make the current process to wait till the spawned process returns.

    Similarly exponential load can be given by spawning 2 processes instead of one.
    #!/bin/bash
    $0 &
    $0 &
    wait

    Collecting data:
    The following code has to be embedded into the above script
    # <epoch time> <PID> <Memory free> <swap free> <active memory> <inactive memory>

    string=`date +%s`" "$$
    i=`cat /proc/meminfo| grep "MemFree:"`
    string=$string" "`expr "$i" : ".* \(.*\) kB"`
    i=`cat /proc/meminfo| grep "SwapFree:"`
    string=$string" "`expr "$i" : ".* \(.*\) kB"`
    i=`cat /proc/meminfo| grep "Active:"`
    string=$string" "`expr "$i" : ".* \(.*\) kB"`
    i=`cat /proc/meminfo| grep "Inactive:"`
    string=$string" "`expr "$i" : ".* \(.*\) kB"`
    echo $string>>log
    Sample output for linear load:
    Sample output for exponential load:

    Error removing file: Directory not empty

    Something really weird happened today. I transferred some data to my external hard disk and for some reason I unplugged it from my comp without doing 'safely remove drive' (reason being I was lazy :P). Then after sometime I put it back on my laptop and tried removing the directory called Main_Game which I had created earlier. It said 'Error while deleting. Error removing file: Directory not empty'.

    Then i tried doing that from terminal using 'rm -rf Main_Game'. Again it didn't work. It said rm: cannot remove 'Main_Game': Directory not empty


    Then I thought there might be some process using that folder. So I restarted and tried again. It didn't work :(

    Then I thought there might be some error in the filesystem. So I did force fsck.

    $ sudo touch /forcefsck
    $ sudo reboot

    It successfully completed fsck. However the problem wasnt fixed

    Then I did something which I should've tried long back and it worked!!

    I simply deleted the folder (not force delete). The folder Main_Game was moved to recycle bin. I just deleted from there.

    I dunno how this worked though :P