Re: Query on s6-log and s6-supervise

From: Laurent Bercot <ska-supervision_at_skarnet.org>
Date: Tue, 08 Jun 2021 11:04:37 +0000

> 1. Why do we need to have separate supervisors for producer and consumer
> long run services? Is it possible to have one supervisor for both producer
> and consumer, because anyhow the consumer service need not to run when the
> producer is down. I can understand that s6 supervisor is meant to monitor
> only one service, but why not monitor a couple of services when it is
> logically valid if I am not wrong.

  Hi Arjun,

  The logic of the supervisor is already complex enough when it has
to monitor one process. It would be quadratically as complex if it
had to monitor two. In all likeliness, the first impact of such a
change would be more bugs, because the logic would be a lot more
difficult to understand and maintain.

  The amount of memory used by the s6 logic itself would not change
(or would *increase* somewhat) if the code was organized in a
different way in order to reduce the amount of processes, and you
would see an overall decrease in code quality.

  Worsening the design to offset operational costs is not a good
trade-off - it is not "logically valid", as you put it. I would not
do it even if the high amount of memory consumed by your processes
was due to s6 itself.

  But it is not the case: your operational costs are due to something
else. See below.


>
> 2. Is it possible to have a single supervisor for a bundle of services?
> Like, one supervisor for a bundle (consisting of few services)?

  Again, there would be no engineering benefit to that. You would likely
see operational benefits, yes, but s6 is the wrong place to try and get
those benefits, because it is not the cause of your operational costs.


> 3. Generally how many instances of s6-supervise can run? We are running
> into a problem where we have 129 instances of s6-supervise that leads to
> higher memory consumption. We are migrating from systemd to s6 init system
> considering the light weight, but we have a lot of s6-log and s6-supervise
> instances that results in higher memory usage compared to systemd. Is it
> fine to have this many number of s6-supervise instances? ps_mem data -
> 5.5 MiB s6-log (46) , 14.3 MiB s6-supervise (129)

  It is normally totally fine to have this many number of s6-supervise
instances (and of s6-log instances), and it is the intended usage.
The skarnet.org server only has 256 MB of RAM, and currently sports 93
instances of s6-supervise (and 44 instances of s6-log) without any
trouble. It could triple that amount without breaking a sweat.

  The real problem here is that your instances appear to use so much
memory: *that* is not normal.
Every s6-supervise process should use at most 4 pages (16k) of private
dirty memory, so for 129 processes I would expect the memory usage to
be around 2.1 MB. Your reported total shows 7 times as much, which
sounds totally out of bounds to me, and even accounting for normal
operational overhead, a factor of 7 is *completely bonkers*.

  There are two possible explanations here:
  - Either ps_mem is not accurately tallying the memory used by a given
set of processes;
  - Or you are using a libc with an incredible amount of overhead, and
your libc (and in particular, I suspect, dynamic linking management in
your libc) is the culprit for the insane amount of memory that the
s6-supervise processes seem to be eating.

  The easiest way to understand what's going on is to find a
s6-supervise process's pid, and to perform
# cat /proc/$pid/smaps_rollup

  That will tell you what's going on for the chosen s6-supervise process
(they're all similar, so the number for the other s6-supervise processes
won't be far off). In particular, look at the Private_Dirty line: that
is the "real" amount of uncompressible memory used by that process.
  It should be around 16k, tops. Anything over that is overhead from
your libc.
  If the value is not too much over 16k, then ps_mem is simply lying to
you and there is nothing to worry about, except that you should use
another tool to tally memory usage.
  But if the value is much higher, then it is time to diagnose deeper:

# cat /proc/$pid/smaps

  That will show you all the mappings performed by your libc, and
the amount of memory that each of these mappings uses. Again, the
most important lines are the Private_Dirty ones - these are the
values that add up for every s6-supervise instance.

  My hunch is that you will see *a lot* of mappings, each using
4k or 8k, or even in some cases 12k, of Private_Dirty memory.
If it is the case, unfortunately there is nothing I can do about it,
because that overhead is entirely caused by your libc.

  However, there is something *you* can do about it:

  - If "ldd /bin/s6-supervise" gives you a line mentioning libs6.so
or libskarnet.so, try recompiling s6 with --enable-allstatic. This
will link against the static version of libs6 and libskarnet, which
will alleviate the costs of dynamic linking. (The price is that the
*text* of s6-supervise will be a little bigger, but it doesn't matter:
text is Shared_Clean, the cost is only incurred once).

  That alone should decrease your memory usage by a lot.

  If that is still not enough, then it means your libc is trash. Sorry,
there is no other word. If you are on Linux and using glibc (which,
indeed, is trash), you can try building skalibs+execline+s6 against
the musl libc (https://musl.libc.org/); and not only will that allow
you to use s6 as intended, with hundreds of s6-supervise instances
without having to worry about memory usage - because musl has very
little overhead - but your s6 binaries will also be smaller and
faster.

  I hope this will help you, and I hope this unfortunate report can
serve as an illustration of *why* it is important to minimize overhead
at every level of a system, especially at lower levels and particularly
in the libc.

--
  Laurent
Received on Tue Jun 08 2021 - 13:04:37 CEST

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