Debugging & Profiling .NET Core Applications on Linux

Gökhan GÖKALP

03.11.2018

dotnetKonf - http://www.dotnetkonf.com

Debugging

&

Profiling

.NET CORE
Applications

Performance bottlenecks?

Why did my application crash?

Debugging

&

Profiling

.NET CORE
Applications

  • Performance is important!
  • That allows us to keep users in our system.

wait

wait

wait

wait

wait

wait

Debugging

&

Profiling

.NET CORE
Applications

as a developer:

We need to know how we can identify bottlenecks.

If we want to develop or refactor applications that will work in a performance manner

Profiling tools!

Who am I?

Gökhan GÖKALP
Software Architect

http://www.gokhan-gokalp.com

E-mail: gok.gokalp@yahoo.com
LinkedIn: in/gokgokalp

Twitter: @gokgokalp
GitHub: gokgokalp

Agenda

  • Profiling CPU Activity in .NET Core Applications
  • Visualizing Stack Traces with Flame Graphs
  • Tracing Runtime Events in .NET Core Applications with LTTng
  • Generating and Analyzing Core Dumps of .NET Core Applications
  • References
  • Contacts

Profiling CPU Activity in .NET Core Applications

in our lifes almost 3 years.

  • Production
  • Staging
  • Learning...

Profiling CPU Activity in .NET Core Applications

Traditional way with .NET Framework on Windows for Debugging and Profiling:

  • Take a dump
  • Analyze it with PerfView, WinDBG etc...
  • Look at CPU activities

 

but now, we are on linux world!

The big point is here, how can we debug & profile .NET Core Applications on Linux against performance problems.

method invocation counts, thread counts, call stacks

Profiling CPU Activity in .NET Core Applications

Some tools:

Purpose Tool
CPU Sampling perf
Dynamic Tracing perf
Static Tracing LTTng
Dump Generation gcore, core_pattern
Dump Analysis LLDB

Profiling CPU Activity in .NET Core Applications

We have two measurement mode while measure CPU.

Sampling:

Profiler queries call stacks of running threads to find the slowest part of the code periodically. (snapshot)

  • Low memory usage
  • CPU times
  • Not all call stacks are captured (small window snapshots)

It's a good choice for long running methods or first look at performance bottlenecks quickly. (no overhead)

Profiling CPU Activity in .NET Core Applications

We have two measurement mode while measure CPU.

Tracing:

Unlike sampling, profiler watches each method invocations to capture the thread CPU time that spent in the method. (entry & exit)

  • Higher memory usage (some overhead)
  • CPU Times & Method invocation counts
  • All call stacks are captured 

It's a good choice for specific scenarios or some parts of application.

Profiling CPU Activity in .NET Core Applications

Perf

Perf is an event-oriented profiler tool that help us for performance investigations on linux-based systems.

Perf is based on the linux kernel's perf_events interface.

Capable both sampling and tracing topic for a lot of different events. (kernel events, hardware events etc...)

Profiling CPU Activity in .NET Core Applications

Perf - first step

Event sources that we can attach:

  • Hardware Events
  • Software Events
  • User Statically-Defined Tracing
  • Dynamic Tracing
  • Timed Profiling

Profiling CPU Activity in .NET Core Applications

Perf - first step

Metrics can be collect: per-cpu, per-process, per-thread

-p : process id

-g : collect call stacks

perf record

Could be big!

Memory Mapped Buffer?

Profiling CPU Activity in .NET Core Applications

Perf - second step

perf report

CPU activities

Profiling CPU Activity in .NET Core Applications

Perf - second step

Before start to profiling, perf must have symbol files like other debug tools. (like pdb files)

After that, hexadecimal addresses could be converted method & variable names.

Symbols

Profiling CPU Activity in .NET Core Applications

Perf - second step

Symbols

COMPlus_PerfMapEnabled=1

for getting symbol information, we need to tell CoreCLR:

Tadaa!

subsequent calls overhead

method
overhead

Profiling CPU Activity in .NET Core Applications

Flame Graph

It is an open-source visualization tool that allow us to identify (why CPU hot) the most frequently called code paths by grouping profile data quickly.

more human
readable, huh?

stack depth

each rectangle are functions

Tracing Runtime Events in .NET Core Applications with LTTng

LTTng handles user-space events (e.g. runtime services, application-level events) using tracepoints generated by CoreCLR in build-time.

It is a lightweight tracing framework against more difficult problems in a similar way to the ETW events.

Tracing Runtime Events in .NET Core Applications with LTTng

No more ETW events. :(

but...

We can use LTTng on Linux like ETW events.

Thanks LTTng community and .NET team for cooperation.

Tracing Runtime Events in .NET Core Applications with LTTng

We can trace:

  • Garbage Collections
  • Assembly Load/Unload
  • Thread Start/Stop
  • Object Allocations
  • Exception Thrown

We can analyze tracing data on the same or another machine like Perf.

Tracing Runtime Events in .NET Core Applications with LTTng

First step

COMPlus_EnableEventLog=1

for getting event logs, we need to tell CoreCLR:

Let's assume, we have an API and want to trace exceptions on runtime:

sudo lttng create dotnetKonf -o ./dotnetkonf-trace
sudo lttng add-context --userspace --type vpid
sudo lttng add-context --userspace --type vtid
sudo lttng add-context --userspace --type procname
sudo lttng enable-event -s dotnetKonf -u --tracepoint DotNETRuntime:Exception*
sudo lttng start
sleep 20
sudo lttng stop
sudo lttng destroy

Tracing Runtime Events in .NET Core Applications with LTTng

Second step - viewer

as a simple default viewer, we can use babeltrace.

sudo babeltrace {TRACE_PATH}

Tracing Runtime Events in .NET Core Applications with LTTng

Second step - viewer

or we can use Eclipse Trace Compass.

Tracing Runtime Events in .NET Core Applications with LTTng

We can trace object allocations, exceptions, but can not access callstacks,

but stack traces are not supported for user-space. :(

Tracing Runtime Events in .NET Core Applications with LTTng

sudo lttng create dotnetKonf -o ./dotnetkonf-trace
sudo lttng add-context --userspace --type vpid
sudo lttng add-context --userspace --type vtid
sudo lttng add-context --userspace --type procname
sudo lttng enable-event --userspace --tracepoint DotNETRuntime:GCStart*
sudo lttng enable-event --userspace --tracepoint DotNETRuntime:GCEnd*
sudo lttng enable-event --userspace --tracepoint DotNETRuntime:GCHeapStats*
sudo lttng enable-event --userspace --tracepoint DotNETRuntime:GCAllocationTick*
sudo lttng enable-event --userspace --tracepoint DotNETRuntime:GCTriggered
sudo lttng start
sleep 20
sudo lttng stop
sudo lttng destroy

Demo - object allocations

Let's assume, we have an API and want to see object allocations:

Tracing Runtime Events in .NET Core Applications with LTTng

sudo babeltrace ./dotnetkonf-trace | grep GCAllocationTick* |\
grep 'TypeName = "[^"]*"' -o | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

Demo - object allocations

Filter the result with babeltrace.

GCAllocationTick fires for every 100KB of object allocations.

Where they came from?

Tracing Runtime Events in .NET Core Applications with LTTng

Demo - object allocations

We can see stack traces with a few tricky ways.

  1. Perf
  2. BCC

EnabledAllocationTick event!

BCC is a toolkit for creating efficient kernel tracing and manipulation programs.

sudo /usr/share/bcc/tools/stackcount ./libcoreclr.so:EventXplatEnabledGCAllocationTick*\
-p {PID} -f > allocs.stacks

Let's see stack traces with BCC's stackcount func.

Tracing Runtime Events in .NET Core Applications with LTTng

Demo - object allocations

sudo /.../FlameGraph/flamegraph.pl < allocs.stacks > allocs.svg

Let's generate a graph.

The stack path where the objects allocated mostly.

Generating and Analyzing Core Dumps of .NET Core Applications

Basically, core dump generation is a standard Linux feature.

Core file is a memory snapshot of the currently running process.

Two ways available:

  • The kernel itself decides when the application crashes.
  • On-demand.
  • code segment
  • data segment
  • stack segment
  • heap segment

Crashed

Generating and Analyzing Core Dumps of .NET Core Applications

On-demand dump generation with gcore utility.

sudo gcore <pid>

The core dump file will be generated with PID number under the execution path of the application.

If the core dump file will be generated as a result of crash:

/home/user/core

Note: We can remove maximum limit of core file. 

ulimit -c unlimited

Generating and Analyzing Core Dumps of .NET Core Applications

The default "/home/user/core" path can configure with "/proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern" configuration.

  • %p: pid
  • %u: uid
  • %g: gid
  • %s: signal number
  • %t: UNIX time of dump
  • %h: hostname
  • %e: executable filename

E.g.

/tmp/cores/core.%p.%e.%t

Output: /tmp/cores/core.1133.bash.1436935952

Generating and Analyzing Core Dumps of .NET Core Applications

Core dump analyzing - LLDB

We need to install a suitable LLDB version with CoreCLR's architecture.

lldb-3.6 'which dotnet' -c core.{PID}

First create LLDB for relevant core dump target.

(lldb) plugin load {SOS_PLUGIN_PATH}

Then load the SOS plugin which comes with .NET Core SDK

Note: You can find SOS plugin with:
find /usr -name libsosplugin.so​

Generating and Analyzing Core Dumps of .NET Core Applications

Core dump analyzing - LLDB

Now we are ready to analyze.

Let's see the threads:

(lldb) sos Threads

this thread looks
suspicious

Generating and Analyzing Core Dumps of .NET Core Applications

Core dump analyzing - LLDB

Let's investigate suspicious thread.

(lldb) setsostid 6d26 1

this thread looks like
suspicious

We mapped thread's OSID with LLDB's thread id.

(lldb) sos PrintException

and print the exception!

Generating and Analyzing Core Dumps of .NET Core Applications

Core dump analyzing - LLDB

this thread looks like
suspicious

References

  • https://lldb.llvm.org/tutorial.html
  • http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/sasha/2017/02/26/analyzing-a-net-core-core-dump-on-linux/
  • https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/Documentation/project-docs/linux-performance-tracing.md
  • http://www.brendangregg.com/perf.html
  • https://github.com/iovisor/bcc
  • https://lttng.org/docs/v2.10/

Contacts

Debugging & Profiling .NET Core Applications on Linux

By Gökhan Gökalp

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Debugging & Profiling .NET Core Applications on Linux

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