cgroups – use to control your cpu and memory

cgroups is a kernel feature and with userspace utilities, we can use the feature to control the cpu and memory for per process. So, lets first install the required tools.

sudo yum install libcgroup-tools

Now, we need to enable the service.

sudo systemctl enable cgconfig.service
sudo systemctl enable cgred.service

cgconfig.service is to enable configuration for cgroups and
cgred.service is to enable configuration for cgroups for processes depending on the name.

Monitor your system with sysusage.

First some information on sysusage:

Description :
SysUsage continuously monitor your systems informations and generate
periodical graph reports using rrdtool or javascript jqplot library.
All reports are shown throught a web interface.

SysUsage grabs all system activities using Sar and system commands allowing
you to keep tracks of your computer or server activity during his life.
It is a great help for performance analysis and resources management. The
threshold notification can alarm you when the system capabilities are
reached by sending SMTP messages or throught Nagios reports.

Continue reading

zswap – compcache, compressed swap for better performance

First, here is a link to article on compcache.

http://code.google.com/p/compcache/wiki/CompilingAndUsingNew

zswap is already in the kernel and you can see the documentation in the kernel documentation. Here is the name of the file if you need:

/usr/share/doc/kernel-doc-$(uname -r)/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt

Here is the overview, in case you do not want to install kernel-doc

Overview:

Zswap is a lightweight compressed cache for swap pages. It takes pages that are
in the process of being swapped out and attempts to compress them into a
dynamically allocated RAM-based memory pool.  zswap basically trades CPU cycles
for potentially reduced swap I/O.  This trade-off can also result in a
significant performance improvement if reads from the compressed cache are
faster than reads from a swap device.

Continue reading

Disable a few cores when you want to save power.

If you have a lot of CPU power and working on battery. If you do not need that much of power and would like to rather save some battery power by disabling some cpus then you can use the below script. This script disables cpus from 4 to 7. You can change the number in the for loop. You would need the sudo to be setup or remove sudo and run the script as root. The script will show you the currently active cpu’s before and after disabling the CPU’s.

Music players on Linux – the poor mans random song player.

If you have more applications running on your system then your system can handle them then you know what I mean when I say that the Music Players take a lot of CPU. Otherwise harmless, but when you are doing too many things, then lot of times you would feel that probably stopping the Music player might help. But then Linux is all about alternatives. So, there is a command line player called mpg123, which does not use so much CPU. But what about playlist 🙂

Benchmarking the system/CPU performance

Have you ever wanted to have a quick check on your CPU performance. I know that lot of people will say that this is not the right way to do this, but here is something that you can use to check the CPU speed.

#!/bin/bash -
#===============================================================================
#
#          FILE:  benchmark.sh
#
#         USAGE:  ./benchmark.sh
#
#   DESCRIPTION:  Benchmark the CPU
#
#       OPTIONS:  ---
#  REQUIREMENTS:  ---
#          BUGS:  ---
#         NOTES:  ---
#        AUTHOR: Amit Agarwal (aka), amit.agarwal@roamware.com
#       COMPANY: Roamware India Pvt Ltd
#       CREATED: 09/21/2011 11:46:03 AM IST
# Last modified: Wed Sep 21, 2011  12:22PM
#      REVISION:  ---
#===============================================================================

add ()
{
    COUNTER=0
    exec 2>&1
    time=$(exec 2>&1;(time while [[  $COUNTER -lt 100000 ]]; do ((COUNTER++)) \
        ; done))
    echo "Time for 100000 additions is "$time
}	# ----------  end of function add  ----------
mul ()
{
    COUNTER=0
    test=2
    exec 2>&1
    time=$(exec 2>&1;(time while [[  $COUNTER -lt 100000 ]]; do ((COUNTER++)) \
        ; ((test=test*2));done))
    echo "Time for 100000 mul is "$time
}	# ----------  end of function add  ----------
div ()
{
    COUNTER=0
    test=1000000000000
    exec 2>&1
    time=$(exec 2>&1;(time while [[  $COUNTER -lt 100000 ]]; do ((COUNTER++)) \
        ; (( test=test/2)); done)|tr -d '\n')
    echo "Time for 100000 divisions is "${time}
}	# ----------  end of function add  ----------

time add
time mul
time div

And here is the output :

BASH Script Performace

Today we will look at some bash code snippests and the performance issues. Lets first look at the problem and the implemented solution:

Problem: We needed to log the output of the ps command for all the process’s. This was required to be done on per minute basis and the output was required in comma separated files. So, here is what was implemented:

pslog=`ps -e -opid,ppid,user,nlwp,pmem,vsz,rss,s,time,stime,pri,nice,pcp:u,args|grep -v PID|sort -r -k 13,13`
        OLD_IFS=$IFS
        IFS=$'\n'
        logarr=( $pslog )
        for LOGLINE in ${logarr[@]}
        do
                LOGLINE=`echo $LOGLINE|awk '{OFS=",";print $1,$2,$3,$4,$5,$6,$7,:$8,$9,$10,$11,$12,$13,$14}'`
                echo $LOGLINE >> output
        done
        IFS=$OLD_IFS

This was working well and there were no issues. But suddenly we started seeing issues with the reported CPU usages. We would see that whenever this script was running the CPU usage was high, specially if there were too many process’s/thread’s on the system during that time.  This code was definitely part of a very large code base, and at this point of time we did not know what was causing the issues.