ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Colin Ian King <colin.king@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 04/09/13 16:06, John Lea wrote:
> Hi All,  two questions about the proposal below:
> 
> 1) How do we differentiate between background non-ui processes that are
> legitimately using 100%+ of the CPU for extended periods of time and
> runaway processes?

Good question.  Most resources are bounded and finite (memory, disc,
etc) where as CPU is essentially free to (ab)use for as long as one
wants. So it is hard to determine if a CPU sucking process is legitimate
or just a poorly written or sub-optimal implementation that could use
less CPU.  In a previous job I worked on codec optimisation, so in my
book all new code is sub-optimal and can be made to work more
efficiently ;-)   Also, from a kernel perspective, I see applications as
resource sucking parasites :-)

Sometimes one can easily observe that a process is misbehaving, such as
getting stuck on a poll() or a select() and burning up cycles spinning
in a tight loop.  For example, I've been working on a tool to observe
system call and resource abuse by applications, see:
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~cking/health-check

This is still work-in-progress, and intended for developers and
automated testing.  It has a lot of overhead as it uses ptrace to
monitor system call activity.

> 
> e.g. We have a photo panorama app.  After a set of photos are taken, the
> camera app passes these photos to a seperate background process to async
> stitch the photos together into a seamless panorama.  This task takes
> say 5 min to complete at 100% CPU to complete, so should run as a lowest
> priority background process regardless of which app is in focus until
> this task is complete. When the panorama is ready, this background
> process then hands the completed result back to the photo app.
> 
> There are other legitimate use cases for why we might want background
> non-UI processes to run at 100%+ CPU usage for extended periods, how are
> these differentiated from the buggy processes? From my understanding we
> are proposing that app developers split any parts of their app that they
> need to run continually in the background regardless of app focus into a
> separate service.
> 
> 2) How do we prevent developers and ourselves from coming to rely on
> this auto-killer, and starting to think "it's not important to fix that
> runaway process bug because it will be caught by the process killer, I
> should work on something else instead"?
> 
> Once this auto-killer is implemented will it not change developer's
> behaviour?  How do we prevent ourselves and app developers from starting
> to rely on this service instead of fixing the underlying bugs?
> 
> cheers,
> John
> 
> 
> On 04/09/13 10:49, Evan Dandrea wrote:
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> In another discussion, James Hunt raised the possibility of
>> periodically checking for runaway processes on Touch, killing those
>> consuming 100% CPU while creating a report to be sent to
>> https://errors.ubuntu.com.
>>
>> I've summarised the key points of that discussion here into a
>> proposal. The hope of this is that it gives everyone a chance to
>> provide input.
>>
>> == Examples ==
>>
>> There are a few examples of this problem biting us already.
>>
>> The original bug James ran into was:
>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bluetooth-touch/+bug/1217865
>>
>> Martin Pitt also raised one where two rogue system service processes
>> constantly used 150% CPU (i. e. 1.5 cores):
>> https://launchpad.net/bugs/1188404
>>
>> A few weeks ago there was a nasty timing bug which caused ueventd to
>> use 100% CPU:
>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/touch-preview-images/+bug/1190792
>>
>> Whoopsie also had a memory corruption bug which caused 100% CPU usage
>> around the same time as the ueventd bug:
>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/touch-preview-images/+bug/1211417
>>
>> Note that this is not really about power consumption. Colin King has
>> done analysis of power consumption on Touch devices and the biggest
>> bang for the buck is ensuring that sensors are turned off when they
>> are not needed, not minimising CPU usage. Instead, please consider
>> this proposal an attempt to better ensure the stability and
>> performance of Touch systems out in the wild.
>>
>> == Implementation ==
>>
>> We will enable the sampling and reporting of high CPU usage in
>> background processes on Touch devices when the device is not in
>> developer mode.
>>
>> Foreground processes will be ignored by this check. They will instead
>> be handled by an "application not responding" (ANR) implementation in
>> Mir. They will be allowed to use 100% CPU unless they block the UI
>> thread for an unreasonable amount of time.
>>
>> With the application lifecycle work, background applications will be
>> suspended and get no CPU time at all, so this check will only apply to
>> system processes.
>>
>> Each background process will be periodically sampled for its CPU
>> usage. If the process is using a large amount of CPU consistently
>> across several of these samplings, it will be killed and an apport
>> report will be created.
>>
>> An outstanding question is what the threshold should be for high CPU
>> usage.
>>
>> == Where will this check live? ==
>>
>> It has been suggested that the task of periodically checking for
>> runaway processes live inside a long-running and lightweight C
>> process. Whoopsie was suggested as a potential candidate.
>>
>> libprocps was raised as potentially helpful, but James pointed out
>> that CPU percentage needed to be calculated by the caller, so another
>> approach may prove easier.
>>
>> == How will we group reports of the same underlying problem? ==
>>
>> https://errors.ubuntu.com will need to receive a string that
>> represents the problem (a signature) to which this instance of a
>> runaway process belongs. This lets the website group together the
>> instances of a problem onto a single page and increment the count for
>> the problem on the front page leaderboard.
>>
>> Whoopsie, or whatever process holds this check, will use the ptrace
>> system call to generate a stack trace of the runaway process which
>> apport can then use to generate a crash signature:
>> http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~apport-hackers/apport/trunk/view/head:/apport/report.py#L1199
>>
>>
>> Martin suggested we could do three stack traces each 1 s ± <random
>> interval> apart, and then chop away the differing part at the top, so
>> that we only keep the common bit.
>>
>> Since we would be generating multiple stack traces, we cannot just
>> build the report and stack trace through the traditional means of
>> triggering apport kernel core pipe handler by sending SIGABRT.
>>
>> == Bringing the check to the Ubuntu desktop ==
>>
>> It was suggested that we could also have this check on the Ubuntu
>> desktop, but it was quickly pointed out that great care would need to
>> be taken to prevent reporting when gcc or Firefox uses 100% CPU.
>>
>> This would be particularly annoying since the desktop currently
>> presents a dialog whenever an error occurs. There are plans underway
>> to group errors that do not need your immediate attention
>> (non-application crashes, e.g. package installation failures) into a
>> single dialog with the next error that does require your attention
>> (Firefox crashing); however, a quicker solution would be to only
>> report these desktop runaway processes on systems that have automatic
>> error reporting enabled.
>>
>> We could then create a blacklist of processes that are known to be
>> intensive but safe using the data gathered from Touch and automatic
>> reporting systems and eventually bring reporting of runaway processes
>> to all Ubuntu systems (save servers).
>>
>> A whitelist was considered, but determined to not save us from
>> problems like the ueventd bug.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Evan
>>
> 
>