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# Debugging with GDB
## Introduction
GDB is a source level debugger for C, C++ and more languages. It allows
inspecting the internal state of a program as it is running as well the
post-mortem inspection of crashed programs.
You can attach GDB to a running process, run a process inside GDB or
examine a coredump.
### Starting GDB
The two most common usages of GDB for scylla is running a process inside
it (e.g. a unit test):
gdb /path/to/executable
You can specify command-line arguments that gdb will forward to the
executable:
gdb /path/to/executable --args arg1 arg2 arg3
Another prevalent usage is to examine coredumps:
gdb --core=/path/to/coredump /path/to/executable
You can also attach it to an already running process:
gdb -p $pid
Where `$pid` is the PID of the running process you wish to attach GDB
to.
### Using GDB
GDB has excellent online documentation that you can find
[here](https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/index.html).
Some of the more important topics:
* [Starting GDB](https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Invocation.html#Invocation)
* [Setting breakpoints](https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Set-Breaks.html#Set-Breaks)
* [Setting catchpoints](https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Set-Catchpoints.html#Set-Catchpoints)
* [Stepping through the code](https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Continuing-and-Stepping.html#Continuing-and-Stepping)
* [Examining the stack](https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Stack.html#Stack)
* [Examining data](https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Data.html#Data)
## Debugging Scylla with GDB
In general Scylla is quite hard to debug in GDB due to its asynchronous
nature. You will soon find that backtraces always lead to the reactor's
event loop and stepping through the code will not work as you expect as
soon as you leave or enter an asynchronous function.
That said GDB is an indispensable tool in debugging coredumps and when
used right can be of great help.
Over the years we have collected a set of tools for helping with debugging
scylla. These are collected in [``scylla-gdb.py``](https://github.com/scylladb/scylla/blob/master/scylla-gdb.py) and are in
the form of [commands](https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Commands.html#Commands),
[conveninence functions](https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Convenience-Funs.html#Convenience-Funs)
and [pretty printers](https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Pretty-Printing.html#Pretty-Printing).
To load the file issue the following command (inside gdb):
(gdb) source /path/to/scylla-gdb.py
You should be now ready to use all of the tools contained therein. To
list all available commands do:
(gdb) help scylla
To read the documentation of an individual command do:
(gdb) help scylla $commandname
Some commands have self explanatory names, some have documentation, and
some have neither :( (contributions are welcome).
To get the list of the available convenience functions do:
(gdb) help function
Note that this will list GDB internal functions as well as those added
by `scylla-gdb.py`.
Again, just like before, to see the documentation of an individual
function do:
(gdb) help function $functionname
### Tips and tricks
#### Tell GDB to not stop on signals used by seastar
When running scylla (or any seastar application for that matter) inside
GDB it will get interrupted often due to catching some signals used by
seastar internally. This makes debugging almost impossible. To avoid
this, instruct GDB to not stop on these signals:
(gdb) handle SIG34 SIG35 SIGUSR1 nostop noprint pass
#### Avoid (some) symbol parsing related crashes
GDB is known to crash when parsing some of scylla's symbols (especially
those related to futures). Usually telling it to not print static
members of classes and structs helps:
(gdb) set print static-members no
#### Enable extended python diagnostics
When using the facilities from `scylla-gdb.py` it is very useful to know
the full stack of a failure in some of the provided tools, so that you
can fix it or report it. To enable this run:
(gdb) set python print-stack full
#### Helping GDB find the source code for the executable
Often you find yourself debugging an executable, whose internal source
paths don't match those where they can be found on your machine. There
is an easy workaround for this:
(gdb) set substitute-path /path/to/src/in/executable /path/to/src/on/your/machine
Note that the pattern that you supply to `set substitute-path` just has
to be a common prefix of the paths. Example: if the source location
inside the executable to some file is `/opt/src/scylla/database.hh` and
on your machine it is `/home/joe/work/scylla/database.hh`, you can make
GDB find the sources on your machine via:
(gdb) set substitute-path /opt/src/scylla /home/joe/work/scylla
This method might not work if the sources do not have a prefix, e.g.
they are relative to the source tree root directory. In this case you can use the
`set directories` command to set the search path of sources for gdb:
(gdb) set directories /path/to/scylla/source/tree
Multiple directories can be listed, separated with `:`.
#### .gdbinit
GDB supports writing arbitrary GDB commands in any file and sourcing it.
One can use this to place commands that one would have to issue every
time when debugging in a file, instead of typing them each time GDB is
started.
Conventionally this file is called `.gdbinit` and GDB in fact will look
for it in you current directory, in your $HOME directory and some other
places. You can always load it by hand if GDB refuses or fails to load it:
(gdb) source /path/to/your/.gdbinit
Scylla provides a `gdbinit` file helpful for debugging scylla
at the root of the source tree. You can `source` it from your
local `.gdbinit` file if you wish.
#### TUI
GDB has a terminal based GUI called
[TUI](https://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/TUI.html#TUI).
This is extremely useful when you wish to see the source code while you
are debugging. The `TUI` mode can be activated by passing `-tui` to GDB
on the command line, or any time by executing the `tui enable` to
activate it and `tui disable` to deactivate it respectively.
By default the source window has the focus in TUI mode, meaning that command
completion, searching history and line editing doesn't work, e.g. if you use
the up and down keys, you will scroll the source file up and down respectively,
instead of moving in the command history. To focus the command window, issue
`focus cmd`. To move the focus to the source window again, issue `focus src`.
#### Thread Local Storage (TLS) variables
Thread local variables are saved in a special area of memory, at a negative
offset from `$fs_base`. Let's look at an example TLS variable, given the
following C++ code from seastar:
namespace seastar::internal {
inline
scheduling_group*
current_scheduling_group_ptr() noexcept {
// Slow unless constructor is constexpr
static thread_local scheduling_group sg;
return &sg;
}
}
Let's have a look in GDB:
(gdb) p &'seastar::internal::current_scheduling_group_ptr()::sg'
$1 = (<thread local variable, no debug info> *) 0x7fc1f11e7c0c
(gdb) p/x $fs_base
$2 = 0x7fc1f11ff700
(gdb) p/x 0x7fc1f11e7c0c - $fs_base
$3 = 0xfffffffffffe850c
(gdb) p/x -0xfffffffffffe850c
$4 = 0x17af4
The variable `sg` is located at offset `0x17af4` beneath `$fs_base`. We
can also calculate the offset (and hence address) of a known TLS
variable in memory as follows:
$fs_offset = $tls_entry - $sizeof_TLS_header
`$sizeof_TLS_header` can be obtained by listing the program headers of the binary:
$ eu-readelf -l ./a.out
Type Offset VirtAddr PhysAddr FileSiz MemSiz Flg Align
[...]
TLS 0x31ead40 0x00000000033ecd40 0x00000000033ecd40 0x000058 0x017bf0 R 0x40
[...]
We are interested in the size of the TLS header, which is in the
`MemSiz` column and is `0x017bf0` in this example. The value of the
`$tls_entry` can be found in the process' symbol table:
$ eu-readelf -s ./a.out
Symbol table [ 5] '.dynsym' contains 1288 entries:
1 local symbol String table: [ 9] '.dynstr'
Num: Value Size Type Bind Vis Ndx Name
[...]
1282: 000000000000010c 4 TLS LOCAL HIDDEN 23 _ZZN7seastar8internal28current_scheduling_group_ptrEvE2sg
[...]
If we substitute these values in we can verify our theory:
(gdb) set $tls_entry = 0x000000000000010c
(gdb) set $sizeof_TLS_header = 0x017bf0
(gdb) p/x $tls_entry - $sizeof_TLS_header
$5 = 0xfffe851c
(gdb) p/x -($tls_entry - $sizeof_TLS_header)
$6 = 0x17ae4
We can also identify a TLS variable based on its address. We know the
value of `$sizeof_TLS_header` and we can easily calculate `$fs_offset`.
To identify the variable we need to calculate its `$tls_entry` based on
which we can find the matching entry in the symbol table. Remaining with
the above example of the address being `0x7fc1f11e7c0c`, we can
calculate this as:
$tls_entry = $sizeof_TLS_header + $fs_offset
Do note however that `$fs_offset` is negative so this is in effect a
substitution:
$tls_entry = 0x017bf0 - 0x17ae4
This yields `0x10c` which is exactly the value of the `Value` column in
the matching symbol table entry. This should work also if you don't have
the address to the start of the object. In this case you have to locate
the entry in the symbol table, whose value range includes the
calculated value. This can be made easier by sorting the symbol table by
the `Value` column.
#### Optimized-out variables
In release builds one will find that a significant portion of variables and
function parameters are optimized out. This is very annoying but often one can
find a way around to inspect the desired variables.
For non-local variables, there is a good chance that a few frames up one can
find another reference that wasn't optimized out. Or one can try to find another
object, which is not optimized out, and which is also known to hold a reference
to the variable.
If the variable is local, one can try to look at the registers (`info
registers`) and try to identify which one holds its value. This is relatively
easy for pointers to objects as heap pointers are easily identifiable (they
start with `0x6` and are composed of 12 digits, e.g.: `0x60f146e3fbc0`) and one
can check the size of the object they point to with `scylla ptr`. If the
pointed-to object is an instance of a class with virtual methods, the object can
be easily identified by looking at its vtable pointer (`x/1a $ptr`).
### Debugging coredumps
Up until release 3.0 we used to build and package Scylla separately for each
supported distribution. Starting with 3.1 we moved to relocatable binaries.
These are built with a common [frozen toolchain](https://github.com/scylladb/scylla/blob/master/tools/toolchain/README.md)
and packages are bundled with all dependencies. This means that post 3.1 there
is just one build across all supported distros and that the exact environment
the binaries were built with is available in the form of a Docker image. This
makes debugging cores generated from relocatable binaries much easier.
As of now, all releases except 2019.1 ship via relocatable packages, so in this
chapter we will focus on how to debug cores generated from relocatable binaries,
with a subsection later explaining how to debug cores generated by 2019.1
binaries.
#### open-coredump.sh
The most convenient way to open a coredump is [scripts/open-coredump.sh](https://github.com/scylladb/scylladb/blob/master/scripts/open-coredump.sh).
Just point it to a coredump and after some time you should get a shell inside the
appropriate dbuild container, with a suggested gdb invocation line to open the
coredump.
If you prefer to open the coredump manually or the script fails for you, continue
below.
#### Relocatable binaries
Cores produced by relocatable binaries can be simply opened in the
[dbuild](https://github.com/scylladb/scylla/blob/master/tools/toolchain/README.md) container they were built with. To do
that, two things (apart from the core itself of course) are needed:
1) The exact frozen toolchain (dbuild container).
2) The exact relocatable package the binary was part of.
##### Obtaining the frozen toolchain
The frozen toolchain is obtained based on the commit id of the version of the
scylla executable the core was produced with. The exact commit hash can be
obtained by running:
```
$ scylla --version
5.2.0~dev-0.20221210.e47794ed9832
````
The version can be divided into 4 parts:
* The version identifier, in this case: 5.2.0~dev; the ~dev suffix means this is
an uncut, development branch (master), for releases this suffix is missing.
* The build identifier, in this case: 0.
* The date, in this case: 20221210.
* The commit hash, in this case: e47794ed9832.
Based on the latter, you can obtain the right frozen toolchain:
$ cd /path/to/scylla
$ git checkout $commit_hash
##### Obtaining the relocatable-package
Once we have the right toolchain, we have to obtain the relocatable package.
This is obtained based on the build-id, which can be obtained from the coredump
like this:
$ eu-unstrip -n --core $corefile
Or from the executable like this:
$ eu-unstrip -n --exec $executable
You can find the relocatable using the
http://backtrace.scylladb.com/index.html search form
using either the scylla Build ID or the Release number (e.g. 5.0.0 or 2022.1)
to search the packages.
The form can also be used to decode backtraces generated
by the corresponding scylla binary.
**NOTE**: Use the normal relocatable package, usually called
`scylla-package.tar.gz`, not the debuginfo one usually called
`scylla-debug-package.tar.gz`.
Build-id:s for all official releases are listed on
http://backtrace.scylladb.com/releases.html.
##### Loading the core
Move the coredump and the unpackaged relocatable package into some dir
`$dir` on your system, then:
```
(host)$ cd /path/to/scylla # with the right commit checked out
(host)$ ./tools/toolchain/dbuild -it -v $dir:/workdir -- bash -l
(dbuild)$ cd /workdir
(dbuild)$ ln -s /path/to/unpackaged-relocatable-package /opt/scylladb # symlink the scylla subdir if you have the unified tarball
(dbuild)$ gdb --core=$corefile /opt/scylladb/libexec/scylla
```
You might need to add
-ex 'set auto-load safe-path /opt/scylladb/libreloc'
to the command line, see [No thread debugging](#no-thread-debugging).
### Troubleshooting
#### Namespace issues
GDB complaints that it can't find `namespace seastar` or some other Scylla
or Seastar symbol that you know exists. This usually happens when GDB is in
the wrong context i.e. a frame is selected which is not in the Scylla executable
but in some other library. A typical situation is opening a coredump and
attempting to access Scylla symbols when the initial frame is in libc.
Move up the stack, or select a frame which is a Scylla or Seastar function to
fix.
#### No thread debugging
Unable to access thread-local variables. Example:
(gdb) p seastar::local_engine
Cannot find thread-local storage for LWP 22604, executable file /usr/lib/debug/usr/bin/scylla.debug:
Cannot find thread-local variables on this target
The first step in finding out why thread debugging doesn't work is enabling
additional information about why thread debugging is not working:
(gdb) set debug libthread-db 1
This has to be done right after starting GDB, *before* the core and the
executable are loaded. You can do this by adding
`-iex "set debug libthread-db 1"` to your gdb command line.
The usual cause is that GDB failed to find some libraries or that the library
versions of those libraries GDB loaded don't match those the core was generated
with.
Of special note is the `libthread_db.so` library, which is crucial for
thread debugging to work. Common causes of failing to find or load this library
are discussed below.
##### Loading denied by auto-load safe-path
You might see a message like this:
warning: File "/opt/scylladb/libreloc/libthread_db.so.1" auto-loading has been declined by your `auto-load safe-path' set to "$debugdir:$datadir/auto-load"
thread_db_load_search returning 0
To declare the directory this library is found at as safe to load from, do:
set auto-load safe-path /opt/scylladb/libreloc
Use the path that is appropriate for your setup. Alternatively you can use `/`
as the path to declare your entire file-system as safe to load stuff from.
Note that `libthread_db.so` is packaged together with `libc`. So if you have the
build-id appropriate `libc` package, you can be sure you have the correct
`libthread_db.so` too.
##### Missing debug symbols for glibc
If you see a message like this:
warning: Expected absolute pathname for libpthread in the inferior, but got .gnu_debugdata for /lib64/libpthread.so.0.
Trying host libthread_db library: /lib64/libthread_db.so.1.
td_ta_new failed: application not linked with libthread
thread_db_load_search returning 0
Installing debug symbols for glibc might solve this. This issue was seen on
Fedora 34, for more details see the
[bug report](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1960867).
Debug symbols can be installed with:
sudo dnf debuginfo-install glibc-2.32-6.fc33.x86_64
Adjust for the exact version you have installed.
##### Missing critical shared libraries
If you ensured `libthread_db.so` is present and is successfully loaded by GDB
but thread debugging still doesn't work, inspect the other libraries loaded by
GDB:
(gdb) info sharedlibrary
The listing will contain the path of the loaded libraries. If a library wasn't
found by GDB that will also be visible in the listing. You can then use the
`file` utility to obtain the build-id of the libraries:
file /path/to/libsomething.so
This build-id must match the one obtained from the core. The library build-ids
from the core can be obtained with:
eu-unstrip -n --core=/path/to/core
In general you can get away some non-core libraries missing or having the wrong
version, but the core libraries like `libc.so`, `libgcc_s.so`, `librt.so` and
`ld.so` (often called something like `ld-linux-x86-64.so.2`) etc. must have the
correct version. Best to ensure all libraries are correct to minimize the chance
of something not working. Also, make sure the build-id of the executable matches
that the core was generated with. Again, you can use `file` to obtain the
build-id of the executable, then compare it with the build-id obtained from the
`eu-unstrip` listing.
For more information on how to obtain the correct version of libraries and how
to override the path GDB loads them from, see [Collecting libraries](#collecting-libraries)
and [Opening the core on another OS](#opening-the-core-on-another-os).
##### Build IDs match but nothing works: can't backtrace, resolve symbols and no thread debugging
Make sure you are using the normal scylla package, not the debuginfo one, see
[Obtaining the relocatable package](#obtaining-the-relocatable-package).
#### GDB crashes when printing the backtrace or some variable
See [Avoid (some) symbol parsing related crashes](#avoid-some-symbol-parsing-related-crashes).
GDB has trouble with frames inlined into the outermost frame in a seastar thread,
or any green threads in general -- where the outermost frame is annotated with
`.cfi_undefined rip`. See
[GDB#26387](https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=26387).
To work around this, pass a limit to `bt`, such that it excludes the problematic
frame. E.g. if `bt` prints 10 frames before GDB crashing, use `bt 9` to avoid the
crash.
#### GDB keeps stopping on some signals
See [Tell GDB to not stop on signals used by seastar](#tell-gdb-to-not-stop-on-signals-used-by-seastar).
### Debugging guides
Guides focusing on different aspects of debugging Scylla. These guides
assume a release build of Scylla.
#### The seastar memory allocator
Seastar has its own memory allocator optimized for Seastar's
thread-per-core architecture. Memory, just like CPU, is sharded among
threads, meaning that each shard has its equally-sized exclusive memory area.
The seastar allocator operates on three levels:
* pages (4KB)
* spans of pages (2^N pages, N ∈ [0, 31])
* objects managed by small pools
Small allocations (<= 16KB) are served by small memory pools. There is
exactly one pool per supported size, and there is a limited number of
sizes available between 1B (8B in practice) and 16KB. Allocations are served
by the pool with the closest, but larger than equal size to the requested
allocation, but alignments complicate this. Pools allocate spans
themselves for the space to allocate objects in.
Large allocations are served by allocating an entire span.
The allocator keeps a description of all the pages and pools in memory
in thread-local variables. Using these, it is possible to arrive at the
metadata describing any allocation with a few steps:
address -> page -> span -> pool?
This is exploited by the `scylla ptr` command which, given an address,
prints the following information:
* The allocation (small or large) this address is part of.
* The offset of the address from the beginning of the allocation.
* Is the object dead or live.
Example:
(gdb) scylla ptr 0x6000000f3830
thread 1, small (size <= 512), live (0x6000000f3800 +48)
It is possible to dump the state of the seastar allocator with the
`scylla memory` command. This prints a report containing the state of
all small pools as well as the availability of spans. It also prints
other Scylla specific information.
#### Continuations chains
Continuation chains are everywhere in Scylla. Every execution flow takes the
form of a continuation chain. This makes debugging very hard because the normal
GDB commands for inspecting and controlling execution flow (`backtrace`, `up`,
`down`, `step`, `next`, `return`, etc.) quickly fail to fulfill their purpose.
One will quickly find that every backtrace just leads to the same event loop in
the seastar reactor.
Continuation chains are formed by tasks. The tasks form an intrusive forward
linked list in memory. Each tasks links to the task that depends on it. Example:
future<> bar() {
return sleep(std::chrono::seconds(10)).then([] {
});
}
future<> foo() {
return bar().then([] {
});
}
When foo() is called a continuation chain of 3 tasks will be created:
* T0: sleep()
* T1: bar()::lambda#1
* T2: foo()::lambda#1
T1 depends on T0, and T2 depends on T1. In memory they form a forward linked
list like:
T0 -> T1 -> T2
The links are provided by the promise-future pairs in these tasks. Each task
contains a future half of one such pair and a promise half of another one. The
future is for the value arriving from the previous task and the promise is for
the value calculated in the local task, that the next task waits on.
The `task` object have the following interface:
class task {
scheduling_group _sg;
public:
virtual void run_and_dispose() noexcept = 0;
virtual task* waiting_task() noexcept = 0;
scheduling_group group() const { return _sg; }
shared_backtrace get_backtrace() const;
};
The only thing stored at a known offset is the scheduling group. Each task
object also has an associated action that is executed when the task runs
(`run_and_dispose()`), as well as pointer to the next task (returned by
`waiting_task()`). However task being a polymorphic object the layout of the
different kind of tasks is not known, so all we can say about them is that
somewhere they contain a promise object, which has a pointer to the future object
of the task that depends on them. Also note that continuations are just one kind
of task, there are other kinds of tasks as well. Many seastar primites,
like `do_with()`, `repeat()`, `do_until()`, etc. have their own task
types.
##### Traversing the continuation chain
Or in other words finding out what are the continuations waited on by this one as
well as the ones waiting on this one.
This involves searching for inbound and outbound references in the task and identifying
the one which is also a task. As this is quite a labour-intensive task, there is
a command in scylla-gdb.py which automates it, called `scylla fiber`. Example
usage:
(gdb) scylla fiber 0x0000600016217c80
#-1 (task*) 0x000060001a305910 0x0000000004aa5260 vtable for seastar::continuation<...> + 16
#0 (task*) 0x0000600016217c80 0x0000000004aa5288 vtable for seastar::continuation<...> + 16
#1 (task*) 0x000060000ac42940 0x0000000004aa2aa0 vtable for seastar::continuation<...> + 16
#2 (task*) 0x0000600023f59a50 0x0000000004ac1b30 vtable for seastar::continuation<...> + 16
This is somewhat similar to a backtrace, in that it shows tasks that are waited
on by this continuation and tasks that are waiting
for this continuation to finish, similar to how upstream functions are waiting
for the called function to finish before continuing their own execution.
See `help scylla fiber` and `scylla fiber --help` for more information on usage.
##### Seastar threads
Seastar threads are a special kind of continuation. Each seastar thread hosts a
stack but it can also be linked into a continuation chain. The stack of seastar
threads is a regular stack and all the normal stack related GDB commands can be
used in it. This can be used to inspect where exactly the seastar thread
stopped when it was suspended to wait on some future. Local variables can be
inspected too. The catch is how to make GDB context switch into the
stack of the seastar stack. Unfortunately there is no method that works
with GDB as of now, the `scylla thread` command crashes GDB and even if it
didn't, it'd only works in live processes.
To get this working a patched GDB is needed, see
https://github.com/denesb/seastar-gdb for instructions on how to use.
#### Debugging assert failures
Assert failures are the easiest (easiest but not easy) coredumps to debug
because we know the condition that failed, we know where and thus the
investigation has a clear scope -- to find out why. This is not always easy
though, especially if the root cause happened much earlier, and thus the state
the node was in at that time is not observable in the coredump. The root cause
might even be on another node altogether. In this case we try to gather as much
information as possible and write debug patches that hopefully catch the problem
earlier, and try to reproduce with them, hoping to get a new coredump that has
more information.
#### Debugging segmentation faults
Segmentation faults are usually caused by use-after-free,
use-after-move, dangling pointer/reference or memory corruption.
Unfortunately, coredumps often contain very little immediate information on what
exactly was wrong. It is rare to find something as obvious as a null pointer
trying to be dereferenced. So one has to dig a little to find out what
exactly triggered the SEGFAULT.
The most useful command in this is `scylla ptr`, as it allows
determining whether the address the current function is working with
belongs to a live object or not.
Once the immediate cause is found, only the "easy" part remains, finding
out how it happened.
In some cases this can be very difficult. For example in the case of a memory
corruption overwriting memory belonging to another object, the overwrite
could have happened much earlier, with no traces of what it was in the
coredump. In this case the same method has to be used that was mentioned
in the case of [debugging assert failures](#debugging-assert-failures):
adding additional debug code and trying to reproduce, hoping to catch
the perpetrator red-handed.
#### Debugging deadlocks
If the process that is stuck is known, start from there. Try to identify the
continuation-chain that is stuck, then
[follow it](#traversing-the-continuation-chain-backward)
to find the future that is blocking it all.
There is no way to differentiate a stuck continuation chain from one
that is making progress unfortunately, so there are not tried-and-proven
methods here either.
#### Debugging Out Of Memory (OOM) crashes
OOM crashes are usually the hardest to debug issues. Not only one has to
determine the immediate cause which is often already hard enough, as
usual one also has to determine what lead to this state, how did it happen.
That said, finding the immediate cause has a pretty standard procedure.
The first step is always issuing a `scylla memory` command and
determining where the memory is. Lets look at a concrete example:
(gdb) scylla memory
Used memory: 7452069888
Free memory: 20082688
Total memory: 7472152576
LSA:
allocated: 1067712512
used: 1065353216
free: 2359296
Cache:
total: 393216
used: 160704
free: 232512
Memtables:
total: 1067319296
Regular:
real dirty: 1064566784
unspooled: 811568656
System:
real dirty: 393216
unspooled: 393216
Streaming:
real dirty: 0
unspooled: 0
Coordinator:
bg write bytes: 42133 B
hints: 0 B
view hints: 0 B
00 "main"
fg writes: 0
bg writes: 0
fg reads: 0
bg reads: -7
05 "statement"
fg writes: 14
bg writes: 5
fg reads: 94
bg reads: 2352
Replica:
Read Concurrency Semaphores:
user sstable reads: 84/100, remaining mem: 138033377 B, queued: 0
streaming sstable reads: 0/ 10, remaining mem: 149443051 B, queued: 0
system sstable reads: 0/ 10, remaining mem: 149443051 B, queued: 0
Execution Stages:
data query stage:
Total 0
mutation query stage:
Total 0
apply stage:
02 "streaming" 287
Total 287
Tables - Ongoing Operations:
pending writes phaser (top 10):
12 cqlstress_lwt_example.blogposts
2 system.paxos
14 Total (all)
pending reads phaser (top 10):
1863 system.paxos
809 cqlstress_lwt_example.blogposts
2672 Total (all)
pending streams phaser (top 10):
0 Total (all)
Small pools:
objsz spansz usedobj memory unused wst%
1 4096 0 0 0 0.0
1 4096 0 0 0 0.0
1 4096 0 0 0 0.0
1 4096 0 0 0 0.0
2 4096 0 0 0 0.0
2 4096 0 0 0 0.0
3 4096 0 0 0 0.0
3 4096 0 0 0 0.0
4 4096 0 0 0 0.0
5 4096 0 0 0 0.0
6 4096 0 0 0 0.0
7 4096 0 0 0 0.0
8 4096 15285 126976 4696 3.7
10 4096 0 8192 8192 99.9
12 4096 173 8192 6116 74.6
14 4096 0 8192 8192 99.8
16 4096 11151 184320 5904 1.0
20 4096 3570 77824 6424 7.9
24 4096 19131 462848 3704 0.4
28 4096 2572 77824 5808 7.3
32 4096 27021 868352 3680 0.4
40 4096 14680 593920 6720 0.7
48 4096 3318 163840 4576 2.4
56 4096 12077 692224 15912 0.9
64 4096 52719 3375104 1088 0.0
80 4096 16382 1323008 12448 0.6
96 4096 17045 1667072 30752 0.3
112 4096 3402 397312 16288 2.5
128 4096 17767 2281472 7296 0.3
160 4096 17722 2912256 76736 0.3
192 4096 8094 1585152 31104 0.4
224 4096 17087 3891200 63712 0.1
256 4096 77945 21274624 1320704 0.1
320 8192 13232 4366336 132096 0.7
384 8192 5571 2203648 64384 1.0
448 4096 4290 1986560 64640 1.7
512 4096 2830 1503232 54272 2.8
640 12288 960 655360 40960 3.9
768 12288 5751 4489216 72448 0.1
896 8192 326 311296 19200 4.6
1024 4096 4320 5677056 1253376 0.7
1280 20480 251 425984 104704 22.2
1536 12288 3818 6373376 508928 1.7
1792 16384 2711 4980736 122624 0.9
2048 8192 594 1343488 126976 9.5
2560 20480 122 458752 146432 25.7
3072 12288 6596 21823488 1560576 0.9
3584 28672 6 294912 273408 91.1
4096 16384 2039 8372224 20480 0.2
5120 20480 7885 43220992 2849792 0.3
6144 24576 8188 54099968 3792896 0.8
7168 28672 30 622592 407552 53.0
8192 32768 8091 66781184 499712 0.7
10240 40960 15058 165216256 11022336 0.4
12288 49152 7034 92471296 6037504 0.3
14336 57344 6815 111935488 14235648 0.2
16384 65536 14046 230555648 425984 0.2
Small allocations: 872148992 [B]
Page spans:
index size [B] free [B] large [B] [spans]
0 4096 1888256 0 0
1 8192 663552 0 0
2 16384 0 0 0
3 32768 32768 2320334848 70811
4 65536 65536 3031105536 46251
5 131072 131072 1161822208 8864
6 262144 3145728 0 0
7 524288 524288 0 0
8 1048576 1048576 0 0
9 2097152 0 2097152 1
10 4194304 12582912 0 0
11 8388608 0 0 0
12 16777216 0 0 0
13 33554432 0 0 0
14 67108864 0 67108864 1
15 134217728 0 0 0
16 268435456 0 0 0
17 536870912 0 0 0
18 1073741824 0 0 0
19 2147483648 0 0 0
20 4294967296 0 0 0
21 8589934592 0 0 0
22 17179869184 0 0 0
23 34359738368 0 0 0
24 68719476736 0 0 0
25 137438953472 0 0 0
26 274877906944 0 0 0
27 549755813888 0 0 0
28 1099511627776 0 0 0
29 2199023255552 0 0 0
30 4398046511104 0 0 0
31 8796093022208 0 0 0
Large allocations: 6582468608 [B]
We can see a couple of things at glance here: free memory is very low,
cache is fully evicted. These are sure signs of a real OOM. Note that
free memory doesn't have to be 0 in the case of an OOM. It is enough for
a size pool to not be able to allocate more memory spans and thus fail
a critical allocations we cannot recover from. Also cache is fully
evicted doesn't mean it has 0 memory, but when it has just a couple of
KB, it is considered fully evicted. Cache is evicted by the seastar memory
allocator's memory reclamation mechanism, which is hooked up with the
cache and will start trying to free up memory by evicting the cache,
once memory runs low.
The cause of the OOM in this case is too many reads (1863) on
`system.paxos`. This can be seen in the replica section of the report.
The Coordinator and replica sections contain high level stats of the
state of the coordinator and replica respectively. These stats summarize
the usual suspects. Sometimes just looking at these is enough to
determine what is the cause of the OOM. If not, one has to look at the
last section: the dump of the state of the small pools and the page
spans. What we are looking for is a small pool or a span size that owns
excessive amounts of memory. Once found (there can be more than one) the
next task is to identify what the objects owning that memory are. Note
that in the case of smaller allocations, the memory is usually occupied
directly by some C++ object, why in the case of larger allocations, these are
usually potentially fragmented buffers, owned by some other object.
If the `scylla memory` output alone is not enough to explain what
exactly is eating up all the memory, there are some further usual
suspects that should be examined.
##### Exploded task- and smp-queues and lots of objects
Look for exploded task- and smp-queues with:
scylla task-queues # lists all task queues on the local shard
scylla smp-queues # lists smp queues
Look for lots of objects with:
scylla task_histogram -a # histogram of all objects with a vtable
A huge number in any of these reports can indicate problems of exploding
concurrency, or a shard not being to keep up. This can easily lead to work
accumulating, in the form of tasks and associated objects, to the point of OOM.
##### Expensive reads
Another usual suspect is the number of sstables. This can be queried via
`scylla sstables`. A large number of sstables for a single table (in the
hundreds or more) can cause an otherwise non-problematic amount of reads to use
excessive amount of memory, potentially leading to OOM.
Reversed- and unpaged-reads (or both, combined) can also consume a huge amount
of memory, to the point of a few of such reads causing OOM. The way to find
these is to inspect readers in memory, trying to locate their partition slice
and having a look at their respective options:
* `partition_slice::option::reversed` is set for a reversed query
* `partition_slice::option::allow_short_read` is cleared for an unpaged
query
Note that scylla have protections against reverse queries since 4.0, and against
unpaged queries since 4.3.
##### Other reasons
If none of the usual suspects are present then all bets are off and one has to
try to identify who the objects of the exploded size-class or span-size belong
to. Unfortunately there are no proven methods here: some try to inspect
the memory patterns and try to make sense of it, some try to build an
object graph out of these objects and make sense of that. For the
latter, the following commands might be of help:
scylla small-objects # lists objects from a small pool
scylla generate-object-graph # generates and visualizes an object graph
Good luck, you are off the charted path here.
#### Use python for inspecting objects and performing computations
GDB is well integrated with Python, and besides using the predefined set of
commands from `scylla-gdb.py`, you can also run an interactive prompt by typing
`python-interactive` or `pi` in gdb console. That allows you to benefit from
the rich set of helper classes and wrappers defined in `scylla-gdb.py`, e.g. in
order to iterate over one of the supported collection types (vectors, small
vectors, maps, tuples, etc.) and print only the interesting bits.
Example:
```
(gdb) source /path/to/scylla-gdb.py
(gdb) python-interactive
>>> db = gdb.parse_and_eval("*(seastar::sharded<replica::database>*)debug::the_database")
>>> instances = std_vector(db["_instances"])
>>> for i, instance in enumerate(instances):
... print(i, instance["service"])
...
0 {
_b = 0x60000403e000,
_p = 0x60000403e010
}
1 {
_b = 0x60100435e000,
_p = 0x60100435e010
}
```
You can also easily evaluate single expressions by using the `python` (or `py`) command:
```
(gdb) py print("\n".join([f" I/O queue {key}: {value}" for key, value in std_unordered_map(next(reactors())["_io_queues"])]))
I/O queue 0: std::unique_ptr<seastar::io_queue> = {
get() = 0x60100012ae00
}
```
In order to define and use variables between gdb and the Python interface,
one can use `gdb.convenience_variable()` and `gdb.set_convenience_variable()`
helpers. That can be clearer than relying on `gdb.parse_and_eval()` for
accessing objects.
Example:
```
(gdb) p debug::the_database
$1 = (seastar::sharded<replica::database> *) 0x7fffffffbdc0
(gdb) set $db=debug::the_database
(gdb) pi
>>> local_db = sharded(gdb.convenience_variable('db')).local()
>>> gdb.set_convenience_variable('local_db', local_db)
>>>
(gdb) p $local_db
$2 = (replica::database *) 0x60000575e010
```
#### Getting Linux process info
Some information is often placed in the notes of the ELF file. Those can be read
with the help of `eu-readelf --notes $core`. The information includes
Process IDs
```
pid: 42359, ppid: 28633, pgrp: 42359, sid: 42359
uid: 1000, gid: 1000, pid: 42359, ppid: 28633, pgrp: 42359, sid: 42359
```
CLI parameters including name and arguments
```
fname: scylla
psargs: /home/xemul/src/scylla/build/dev/scylla --smp 2 -m 1G --collectd 0 --overprovis
```
Signals information
```
info.si_signo: 6, info.si_code: 0, info.si_errno: 0, cursig: 6
sigpend: <>
sighold: ~<1-4,6,8-9,11,14-15,18-22,32-33,35>
```
Runtime process information like times and states
```
utime: 1.207371, stime: 1.736005, cutime: 0.000000, cstime: 0.000000
state: 0, sname: R, zomb: 0, nice: 0, flag: 0x0000000000400600
```
File mappings
```
238 files:
7ff5815e2000-7ff5815f2000 00000000 65536 /[aio] (deleted)
7ff5815f2000-7ff581603000 00000000 69632 /[aio] (deleted)
7ff581603000-7ff581613000 00000000 65536 /[aio] (deleted)
7ff581613000-7ff58163b000 00000000 163840 /usr/lib64/libc.so.6
7ff58163b000-7ff5817a4000 00028000 1478656 /usr/lib64/libc.so.6
7ff5817a4000-7ff5817f2000 00191000 319488 /usr/lib64/libc.so.6
7ff5817f2000-7ff5817f6000 001de000 16384 /usr/lib64/libc.so.6
7ff5817f6000-7ff5817f8000 001e2000 8192 /usr/lib64/libc.so.6
7ff581800000-7ff58189d000 00000000 643072 /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6.0.33
7ff58189d000-7ff5819d5000 0009d000 1277952 /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6.0.33
7ff5819d5000-7ff581a51000 001d5000 507904 /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6.0.33
7ff581a51000-7ff581a5e000 00251000 53248 /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6.0.33
7ff581a5e000-7ff581a5f000 0025e000 4096 /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6.0.33
```
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