Re: [PATCH 2/2] scripts: add kmemleak2pprof.py for slab usage analysis

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Thu Aug 30 2018 - 20:21:12 EST


On Thu, 30 Aug 2018 09:29:40 +0200 Vincent Whitchurch <vincent.whitchurch@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 04:28:04PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Tue, 28 Aug 2018 12:39:14 +0200 Vincent Whitchurch <vincent.whitchurch@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > > Add a script which converts /sys/kernel/debug/kmemleak_all to the pprof
> > > format, which can be used for analysing memory usage. See
> > > https://github.com/google/pprof.
> >
> > Why is this better than /proc/slabinfo?
>
> slabinfo just tells you how much memory is being used in a particular
> slab, it doesn't give you a breakdown of who allocated all that memory.
> slabinfo can't also tell you how much memory a particular subsystem is
> using.
>
> For example, here we can see that tracer_init_tracefs() and its callers
> are using ~12% of the total tracked memory:
>
> $ pprof -top -compact_labels -cum prof
> Showing nodes accounting for 13418.95kB, 92.07% of 14575.28kB total
> Dropped 4069 nodes (cum <= 72.88kB)
> flat flat% sum% cum cum%
> ...
> 0 0% 56.71% 1832.15kB 12.57% tracer_init_tracefs+0x74/0x1cc
>
>
> And that tracefs' dentrys use 500 KiB and its inodes use 1+ MiB:
>
> $ pprof -text -compact_labels -focus tracer_init_tracefs -nodecount 2 prof
> Main binary filename not available.
> Showing nodes accounting for 1794.85kB, 12.31% of 14575.28kB total
> Dropped 1912 nodes (cum <= 72.88kB)
> Showing top 2 nodes out of 32
> flat flat% sum% cum cum%
> 1294.56kB 8.88% 8.88% 1294.56kB 8.88% new_inode_pseudo+0x8/0x4c
> 500.29kB 3.43% 12.31% 500.29kB 3.43% d_alloc+0x10/0x78
> ...

OK, thanks. Please include this info in future changelogs?