You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You signed out in another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You switched accounts on another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.Dismiss alert
/proc/pid/smaps_rollup is a new proc file that improves the performance
of user programs that determine aggregate memory statistics (e.g., total
PSS) of a process.
Android regularly "samples" the memory usage of various processes in
order to balance its memory pool sizes. This sampling process involves
opening /proc/pid/smaps and summing certain fields. For very large
processes, sampling memory use this way can take several hundred
milliseconds, due mostly to the overhead of the seq_printf calls in
task_mmu.c.
smaps_rollup improves the situation. It contains most of the fields of
/proc/pid/smaps, but instead of a set of fields for each VMA,
smaps_rollup instead contains one synthetic smaps-format entry
representing the whole process. In the single smaps_rollup synthetic
entry, each field is the summation of the corresponding field in all of
the real-smaps VMAs. Using a common format for smaps_rollup and smaps
allows userspace parsers to repurpose parsers meant for use with
non-rollup smaps for smaps_rollup, and it allows userspace to switch
between smaps_rollup and smaps at runtime (say, based on the
availability of smaps_rollup in a given kernel) with minimal fuss.
By using smaps_rollup instead of smaps, a caller can avoid the
significant overhead of formatting, reading, and parsing each of a large
process's potentially very numerous memory mappings. For sampling
system_server's PSS in Android, we measured a 12x speedup, representing
a savings of several hundred milliseconds.
One alternative to a new per-process proc file would have been including
PSS information in /proc/pid/status. We considered this option but
thought that PSS would be too expensive (by a few orders of magnitude)
to collect relative to what's already emitted as part of
/proc/pid/status, and slowing every user of /proc/pid/status for the
sake of readers that happen to want PSS feels wrong.
The code itself works by reusing the existing VMA-walking framework we
use for regular smaps generation and keeping the mem_size_stats
structure around between VMA walks instead of using a fresh one for each
VMA. In this way, summation happens automatically. We let seq_file
walk over the VMAs just as it does for regular smaps and just emit
nothing to the seq_file until we hit the last VMA.
Benchmarks:
using smaps:
iterations:1000 pid:1163 pss:220023808
0m29.46s real 0m08.28s user 0m20.98s system
using smaps_rollup:
iterations:1000 pid:1163 pss:220702720
0m04.39s real 0m00.03s user 0m04.31s system
We're using the PSS samples we collect asynchronously for
system-management tasks like fine-tuning oom_adj_score, memory use
tracking for debugging, application-level memory-use attribution, and
deciding whether we want to kill large processes during system idle
maintenance windows. Android has been using PSS for these purposes for
a long time; as the average process VMA count has increased and and
devices become more efficiency-conscious, PSS-collection inefficiency
has started to matter more. IMHO, it'd be a lot safer to optimize the
existing PSS-collection model, which has been fine-tuned over the years,
instead of changing the memory tracking approach entirely to work around
smaps-generation inefficiency.
Tim said:
: There are two main reasons why Android gathers PSS information:
:
: 1. Android devices can show the user the amount of memory used per
: application via the settings app. This is a less important use case.
:
: 2. We log PSS to help identify leaks in applications. We have found
: an enormous number of bugs (in the Android platform, in Google's own
: apps, and in third-party applications) using this data.
:
: To do this, system_server (the main process in Android userspace) will
: sample the PSS of a process three seconds after it changes state (for
: example, app is launched and becomes the foreground application) and about
: every ten minutes after that. The net result is that PSS collection is
: regularly running on at least one process in the system (usually a few
: times a minute while the screen is on, less when screen is off due to
: suspend). PSS of a process is an incredibly useful stat to track, and we
: aren't going to get rid of it. We've looked at some very hacky approaches
: using RSS ("take the RSS of the target process, subtract the RSS of the
: zygote process that is the parent of all Android apps") to reduce the
: accounting time, but it regularly overestimated the memory used by 20+
: percent. Accordingly, I don't think that there's a good alternative to
: using PSS.
:
: We started looking into PSS collection performance after we noticed random
: frequency spikes while a phone's screen was off; occasionally, one of the
: CPU clusters would ramp to a high frequency because there was 200-300ms of
: constant CPU work from a single thread in the main Android userspace
: process. The work causing the spike (which is reasonable governor
: behavior given the amount of CPU time needed) was always PSS collection.
: As a result, Android is burning more power than we should be on PSS
: collection.
:
: The other issue (and why I'm less sure about improving smaps as a
: long-term solution) is that the number of VMAs per process has increased
: significantly from release to release. After trying to figure out why we
: were seeing these 200-300ms PSS collection times on Android O but had not
: noticed it in previous versions, we found that the number of VMAs in the
: main system process increased by 50% from Android N to Android O (from
: ~1800 to ~2700) and varying increases in every userspace process. Android
: M to N also had an increase in the number of VMAs, although not as much.
: I'm not sure why this is increasing so much over time, but thinking about
: ASLR and ways to make ASLR better, I expect that this will continue to
: increase going forward. I would not be surprised if we hit 5000 VMAs on
: the main Android process (system_server) by 2020.
:
: If we assume that the number of VMAs is going to increase over time, then
: doing anything we can do to reduce the overhead of each VMA during PSS
: collection seems like the right way to go, and that means outputting an
: aggregate statistic (to avoid whatever overhead there is per line in
: writing smaps and in reading each line from userspace).
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170812022148.178293-1-dancol@google.com
Signed-off-by: Daniel Colascione <dancol@google.com>
Cc: Tim Murray <timmurray@google.com>
Cc: Joel Fernandes <joelaf@google.com>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Cc: Sonny Rao <sonnyrao@chromium.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
0 commit comments