When performance of one of the Nova services is worse than expected, and other sorts of analysis do not lead to candidate fixes, profiling is an excellent tool for producing detailed analysis of what methods in the code are called the most and which consume the most time.
Because most Nova services use eventlet, the standard profiling tool provided
with Python, cProfile, will not work. Something is required to keep track of
changing tasks. Thankfully eventlet comes with
eventlet.green.profile.Profile
, a mostly undocumented class that provides a
similar (but not identical) API to the one provided by Python’s Profile
while outputting the same format.
Note
The eventlet Profile outputs the prof
format produced by
profile
, which is not the same as that output by cProfile
.
Some analysis tools (for example, SnakeViz) only read the latter
so the options for analyzing eventlet profiling are not always
deluxe (see below).
This guide assumes the Nova service being profiled is running devstack, but that is not necessary. What is necessary is that the code associated with the service can be changed and the service restarted, in place.
Profiling the entire service will produce mostly noise and the output will be
confusing because different tasks will operate during the profile run. It is
better to begin the process with a candidate task or method within the
service that can be associated with an identifier. For example,
select_destinations
in the FilterScheduler
can be associated with the
list of instance_uuids
passed to it and it runs only once for that set of
instance uuids.
The process for profiling is:
nova-compute
processes. Or you may wish to launch many
instances if you are evaluating a method that loops over instances.Profile
object and start()
it.stop()
profiling and write
the data (with dump_stats()
) to a reasonable location.Note
stop()
and start()
are two of the ways in which the eventlet
Profile
API differs from the stdlib. There the methods are
enable()
and disable()
.
For this example we will analyze select_destinations
in the
FilterScheduler
. A known problem is that it does excessive work when
presented with too many candidate results from the Placement service. We’d like
to know why.
We’ll configure and run devstack with FakeVirtDriver so there are several
candidate hypervisors (the following local.conf
is also useful for other
profiling and benchmarking scenarios so not all changes are relevant here):
[[local|localrc]]
ADMIN_PASSWORD=secret
DATABASE_PASSWORD=$ADMIN_PASSWORD
RABBIT_PASSWORD=$ADMIN_PASSWORD
SERVICE_PASSWORD=$ADMIN_PASSWORD
VIRT_DRIVER=fake
# You may use different numbers of fake computes, but be careful: 100 will
# completely overwhelm a 16GB, 16VPCU server. In the test profiles below a
# value of 50 was used, on a 16GB, 16VCPU server.
NUMBER_FAKE_NOVA_COMPUTE=25
disable_service cinder
disable_service horizon
disable_service dstat
disable_service tempest
[[post-config|$NOVA_CONF]]
rpc_response_timeout = 300
# Disable filtering entirely. For some profiling this will not be what you
# want.
[filter_scheduler]
enabled_filters = '""'
# Send only one type of notifications to avoid notification overhead.
[notifications]
notification_format = unversioned
Change the code in nova/scheduler/filter_scheduler.py
as follows:
diff --git a/nova/scheduler/filter_scheduler.py b/nova/scheduler/filter_scheduler.py
index 672f23077e..cb0f87fe48 100644
--- a/nova/scheduler/filter_scheduler.py
+++ b/nova/scheduler/filter_scheduler.py
@@ -49,92 +49,99 @@ class FilterScheduler(driver.Scheduler):
def select_destinations(self, context, spec_obj, instance_uuids,
alloc_reqs_by_rp_uuid, provider_summaries,
allocation_request_version=None, return_alternates=False):
"""Returns a list of lists of Selection objects, which represent the
hosts and (optionally) alternates for each instance.
:param context: The RequestContext object
:param spec_obj: The RequestSpec object
:param instance_uuids: List of UUIDs, one for each value of the spec
object's num_instances attribute
:param alloc_reqs_by_rp_uuid: Optional dict, keyed by resource provider
UUID, of the allocation_requests that may
be used to claim resources against
matched hosts. If None, indicates either
the placement API wasn't reachable or
that there were no allocation_requests
returned by the placement API. If the
latter, the provider_summaries will be an
empty dict, not None.
:param provider_summaries: Optional dict, keyed by resource provider
UUID, of information that will be used by
the filters/weighers in selecting matching
hosts for a request. If None, indicates that
the scheduler driver should grab all compute
node information locally and that the
Placement API is not used. If an empty dict,
indicates the Placement API returned no
potential matches for the requested
resources.
:param allocation_request_version: The microversion used to request the
allocations.
:param return_alternates: When True, zero or more alternate hosts are
returned with each selected host. The number
of alternates is determined by the
configuration option
`CONF.scheduler.max_attempts`.
"""
+ from eventlet.green import profile
+ pr = profile.Profile()
+ pr.start()
+
self.notifier.info(
context, 'scheduler.select_destinations.start',
dict(request_spec=spec_obj.to_legacy_request_spec_dict()))
compute_utils.notify_about_scheduler_action(
context=context, request_spec=spec_obj,
action=fields_obj.NotificationAction.SELECT_DESTINATIONS,
phase=fields_obj.NotificationPhase.START)
host_selections = self._schedule(context, spec_obj, instance_uuids,
alloc_reqs_by_rp_uuid, provider_summaries,
allocation_request_version, return_alternates)
self.notifier.info(
context, 'scheduler.select_destinations.end',
dict(request_spec=spec_obj.to_legacy_request_spec_dict()))
compute_utils.notify_about_scheduler_action(
context=context, request_spec=spec_obj,
action=fields_obj.NotificationAction.SELECT_DESTINATIONS,
phase=fields_obj.NotificationPhase.END)
+ pr.stop()
+ pr.dump_stats('/tmp/select_destinations/%s.prof' % ':'.join(instance_uuids))
+
return host_selections
Make a /tmp/select_destinations
directory that is writable by the user
nova-scheduler will run as. This is where the profile output will go.
Restart the scheduler service. Note that systemctl restart
may not kill
things sufficiently dead, so:
sudo systemctl stop devstack@n-sch
sleep 5
sudo systemctl start devstack@n-sch
Create a server (which will call select_destinations
):
openstack server create --image cirros-0.4.0-x86_64-disk --flavor c1 x1
In /tmp/select_destinations
there should be a file with a name using the
uuid of the created server with a .prof
extension.
Change to that directory and view the profile using the pstats interactive mode:
python3 -m pstats ef044142-f3b8-409d-9af6-c60cea39b273.prof
Note
The major version of python used to analyze the profile data must be the same as the version used to run the process being profiled.
Sort stats by their cumulative time:
ef044142-f3b8-409d-9af6-c60cea39b273.prof% sort cumtime
ef044142-f3b8-409d-9af6-c60cea39b273.prof% stats 10
Tue Aug 6 17:17:56 2019 ef044142-f3b8-409d-9af6-c60cea39b273.prof
603477 function calls (587772 primitive calls) in 2.294 seconds
Ordered by: cumulative time
List reduced from 2484 to 10 due to restriction <10>
ncalls tottime percall cumtime percall filename:lineno(function)
1 0.000 0.000 1.957 1.957 profile:0(start)
1 0.000 0.000 1.911 1.911 /mnt/share/opt/stack/nova/nova/scheduler/filter_scheduler.py:113(_schedule)
1 0.000 0.000 1.834 1.834 /mnt/share/opt/stack/nova/nova/scheduler/filter_scheduler.py:485(_get_all_host_states)
1 0.000 0.000 1.834 1.834 /mnt/share/opt/stack/nova/nova/scheduler/host_manager.py:757(get_host_states_by_uuids)
1 0.004 0.004 1.818 1.818 /mnt/share/opt/stack/nova/nova/scheduler/host_manager.py:777(_get_host_states)
104/103 0.001 0.000 1.409 0.014 /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/oslo_versionedobjects/base.py:170(wrapper)
50 0.001 0.000 1.290 0.026 /mnt/share/opt/stack/nova/nova/scheduler/host_manager.py:836(_get_instance_info)
50 0.001 0.000 1.289 0.026 /mnt/share/opt/stack/nova/nova/scheduler/host_manager.py:820(_get_instances_by_host)
103 0.001 0.000 0.890 0.009 /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/sqlalchemy/orm/query.py:3325(__iter__)
50 0.001 0.000 0.776 0.016 /mnt/share/opt/stack/nova/nova/objects/host_mapping.py:99(get_by_host)
From this we can make a couple of useful inferences about get_by_host
:
FakeVirtDriver
hypervisors
configured for these tests.0.776 / 1.957
) the select_destinations
method
(indicated by profile:0(start)
, above).Several other sort modes can be used. List those that are available by entering
sort
without arguments.
Real world use indicates that the eventlet profiler is not perfect. There are situations where it will not always track switches between greenlets as well as it could. This can result in profile data that does not make sense or random slowdowns in the system being profiled. There is no one size fits all solution to these issues; profiling eventlet services is more an art than science. However, this section tries to provide a (hopefully) growing body of advice on what to do to work around problems.
The creation of this caveat section was inspired by issues experienced while
profiling nova-compute
. The nova-compute
process is not allowed to
speak with a database server directly. Instead communication is mediated
through the conductor, communication happening via oslo.versionedobjects
and remote calls. Profiling methods such as update_available_resource
in
the ResourceTracker, which needs information from the database, results in
profile data that can be analyzed but is incorrect and misleading.
This can be worked around by temporarily changing nova-compute
to allow it
to speak to the database directly:
diff --git a/nova/cmd/compute.py b/nova/cmd/compute.py
index 01fd20de2e..655d503158 100644
--- a/nova/cmd/compute.py
+++ b/nova/cmd/compute.py
@@ -50,8 +50,10 @@ def main():
gmr.TextGuruMeditation.setup_autorun(version, conf=CONF)
- cmd_common.block_db_access('nova-compute')
- objects_base.NovaObject.indirection_api = conductor_rpcapi.ConductorAPI()
+ # Temporarily allow access to the database. You must update the config file
+ # used by this process to set [database]/connection to the cell1 database.
+ # cmd_common.block_db_access('nova-compute')
+ # objects_base.NovaObject.indirection_api = conductor_rpcapi.ConductorAPI()
objects.Service.enable_min_version_cache()
server = service.Service.create(binary='nova-compute',
topic=compute_rpcapi.RPC_TOPIC)
The configuration file used by the nova-compute
process must also be
updated to ensure that it contains a setting for the relevant database:
[database]
connection = mysql+pymysql://root:secret@127.0.0.1/nova_cell1?charset=utf8
In a single node devstack setup nova_cell1
is the right choice. The
connection string will vary in other setups.
Once these changes are made, along with the profiler changes indicated in the
example above, nova-compute
can be restarted and with luck some useful
profiling data will emerge.
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