This is a utility with a set of tests to explore and compare different ways of detecting ‘memory pressure’ (the system is running out of free memory) state in Linux kernel-based OS.
It consists of a few sub-components, that collect and analyze various metrics:
This reads and parses /proc/meminfo file and generates the following metrics:
mem_total - total system physical memory (in megabytes)
mem_avail_est - the amount of memory that is available for a new workload, without pushing the system into swap, estimated from MemFree, Active(file), Inactive(file), and SReclaimable, as well as the "low" watermarks from /proc/zoneinfo file. This is counted using a legacy algorithm from Linux kernel, see https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=34e431b0a patch description and code comments for the details and explanations.
mem_avail - the amount of memory that is available for a new workload, without pushing the system into swap, 'MemAvailable' param from /proc/meminfo file. Current Linux kernel versions count this in a slightly different way than in a previous metric.
mem_pcnt - percent of physical memory filling. This can be used for "simple" memory pressure threshold-based evaluation.
swp_pcnt - percent of swap usage
swp_free - free swap space (in megabytes)
swp_total - total swap spaces (in megabytes)
Optional metrics:
mem_reclaim - Part of Slab, that might be reclaimed, such as caches (in megabytes)
mem_inactive - The total amount of buffer or page cache memory, that are free and and available (in megabytes)
To enable optional metrics, you can add a custom option to the command line like -showInactive -showReclaimable
One task of this observer is to monitor 'pgmajfault' (page faults counter) parameter. In case if current faults per second value is significantly higher than the average, we can assume that swap trashing is happening. Because sample times are inconsistent and we're measuring CPU time instead of real time, EWMA low-pass filter is applied for the values.
Metrics:
swp_flts_sec - page faults per second
swp_flts_sec_f - page faults per second with EWMA low-pass filter
swp_flts_mult- current page faults per second and average page faults per second ratio. This can be used for swap trashing evaluation.
Custom options:
lowPassHalfLifeSeconds - low-pass filter half-life time (in seconds), default is 30.
averageOnlyCurrent - don't calculate average pages faults using statics collected by the OS before the program was started, use only new values (default: false).
Example: -lowPassHalfLifeSeconds=15 -averageOnlyCurrent
Another task is to count 'swap tendency' metric, as it is described here https://access.redhat.com/solutions/103833
The actual problem is that 'swappines' is a standard system param, 'mapped ratio' can be counted from 'nr_mapped' system metric, but the 'distress' value is inaccessible from the kernel internals for user-space software. So this method, unfortunately, is unusable in production, and that's why it is disabled by default. You can enable it with -showTendency option.
Metrics:
swp_tend - 'swap tendency' metric counted as described above.
This sets up cgroups 'memory_pressure' event file descriptor and subscribes for these events. CGroups subsystem allows us to set physical and virtual memory limits for the process or process group. "Memory pressure" eval is based on "scanned/reclaimed pages" ratio, see Linux kernel comments for details: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/mm/vmpressure.c?id=34e431b0ae398fc54ea69ff85ec700722c9da773
/sys/fs/cgroup/memory/cgroup.event_control is used to subscribe for events from /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/memory.pressure_level - this is a standard cgroups mechanism.
Metric from this observer:
cgroups - bit mask ('critical - 'medium' - 'low'). E.g., in case of 'low' trigger, the value will be 1, in case of all triggers active, the value will be equal to 7.
This observer may require superuser rights to initialize and run.
PSI aggregates and reports the overall wallclock time in which the
tasks in a system wait for contended hardware resources. In modern Linux kernels, /proc/pressure/memory file provides information on the time that processes spend waiting due to memory pressure.
The metics are:
psi_some - the percentage of the time that at least one process could be running if it weren't waiting for memory resources
psi_full - the percentage of time that nobody is able to use the CPU for actual work due to memory pressure
By default, avg10 (10 seconds averaged) values are used. You can override it using custom option, e.g. -psiAvgMetric="avg60"
This sets up PSI 2 event file descriptors and subscribes for the triggers. A trigger describes the maximum cumulative stall time over a specific time window, e.g. 100ms of total stall time within any 500ms window to generate a wakeup event. Triggers are fired when resource pressure exceeds certain thresholds. Please refer to Linux kernel documentation for details: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/accounting/psi.html#monitoring-for-pressure-thresholds
Metric from this observer:
psi_trig - bit mask ('critical - 'medium'). E.g., in case of 'medium' trigger, the value will be 1, in case of both triggers fired, the value will be equal to 3.
This observer may require superuser rights to initialize and run.
Default triggers thresholds settings are some 150000 1000000 and full 100000 1000000, but you can override it using options: -psiMediumTrigger="some 200000 1000000" -psiCriticalTrigger="some 300000 1000000"
And one more option is a trigger timeout (in seconds) related to the time windows value from thresholds settings. If the trigger doesn't fire again during the timeout, the bitmask for this trigger is set back to 0. The default value is 5 seconds, you can override it: -psiTrigTimeout=2
Allocator is used for allocating (^_^) new memory block every second. Because 'overcommit memory' feature is enabled by default on modern Linux systems, allocator also fills one byte in every memory page with a random value to force the system memory allocator to allocate the memory page (TODO: rewrite this paragraph in a human-readable style :) )
The default block size is 128 megabytes, it can also be specified as a command-line argument.
In case if 'block size' value is set to 0, 'memory-pressure' binary will not initialize and start the allocator module at all and will work simply in passive mode.
Also it is possible to pre-allocate some block with a specified size before the test, and set the maximum limit of allocated memory, and the test will stop after reaching it.
Command line arguments:
-allocInterval int
time delay between allocations (in seconds) (default 1)
-blockSize int
block size for every allocation (in Mb), 0 to disable periodical allocator (default 128)
-initialSize int
size to allocate before test start (in Mb), 0 to disable initial allocation
-limit int
maximum allocated memory size (in Mb), 0 to disable the limit
Allocator reports total allocated memory blocks size to 'alloctd' metric.
It collects all the metrics from the sub-components and prints to the stdout every N (default N=5, right) seconds or in case of events. It shows adds the time from the process start (in seconds) in the 'time' metric.
Command line argument:
-printInterval int
time delay between current status updates (in seconds) (default 5)
It looks like this:
2019/09/18 19:58:01 System page size is 4096 bytes
2019/09/18 19:58:01 System timer frequency is 100 Hz
2019/09/18 19:58:01 Using block size 128 Mb
alloctd, cgroups, mem_avail, mem_avail_est, mem_pcnt, mem_total, psi_full, psi_some, swp_flts_mult, swp_flts_sec, swp_flts_sec_f, swp_free, swp_pcnt, swp_tend, swp_total, time,
640, 0, 21502.88, 21524.23, 32.99, 32091.43, 0.00, 0.00, 0.88, 0.00, 9.81, 30518.00, 0.00, 11.75, 30518.00, 5,
1280, 0, 20837.51, 20858.86, 35.07, 32091.43, 0.00, 0.00, 0.79, 0.61, 8.83, 30518.00, 0.00, 11.75, 30518.00, 10,
1920, 0, 20172.38, 20193.73, 37.14, 32091.43, 0.00, 0.00, 0.70, 0.00, 7.83, 30518.00, 0.00, 11.75, 30518.00, 15,
2560, 0, 19509.39, 19530.74, 39.21, 32091.43, 0.00, 0.00, 0.63, 0.00, 7.11, 30518.00, 0.00, 11.75, 30518.00, 20,
2944, 1, 18992.82, 19002.17, 40.82, 32091.43, 0.00, 0.00, 0.59, 0.00, 6.55, 30518.00, 0.00, 11.75, 30518.00, 23,
git clone, go build and run!
And, of course, go test if you need this.
WTFPL http://www.wtfpl.net/