Re: App blocked in futex() burns 14% CPU.

From: Chris Friesen
Date: Thu Jul 14 2011 - 18:55:17 EST


On 07/14/2011 04:34 PM, Jesper Juhl wrote:
So, I've recently started enabling the KDE desktop search on my box and it
runs some indexing services (naturally) to keep track of changes to files.
One of the apps it starts is a process named "virtuoso-t". This process
burns a *lot* of CPU when it's just started, but once it has caught up
with recent changes it quiets down. It doesn't quite quiet down to the
level I'd expect though. I see it constantly using 12-14% CPU time in
'top' even when there is *nothing* going on on the machine :

top - 00:25:09 up 2:38, 2 users, load average: 0.01, 0.04, 0.05
Tasks: 155 total, 1 running, 153 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.7%us, 0.8%sy, 3.7%ni, 94.6%id, 0.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 3853028k total, 2154696k used, 1698332k free, 184280k buffers
Swap: 4200992k total, 0k used, 4200992k free, 996824k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1952 jj 39 19 362m 263m 6544 S 14 7.0 25:09.54 virtuoso-t
1811 jj 20 0 635m 27m 17m S 2 0.7 2:49.78 knotify4
1928 jj 39 19 595m 26m 18m S 1 0.7 2:58.40 nepomukservices

This box has a dual core Intel core i5-560M CPU with hyperthreading, so it
is 12-14% of a fairly capable CPU - that's rather a lot more than I'd
expect when the box is idle and there's nothing for the process to do.

So, I tried strace'ing the process and it seems to just be blocked in
futex() most of the time (like 99%) :

[jj@dragon ~]$ strace -p 1952
Process 1952 attached - interrupt to quit
futex(0x3086424, FUTEX_WAIT_PRIVATE, 503, NULL

So it's just sitting there doing nothing, which lead me to think that this
is probably not a bug in the application - if it was doing some silly
polling loop or similar I would not just see it blocked in a futex() call.
So I'm guessing something must be happening in kernel space that's burning
a lot of CPU.. I could be completely wrong of course, and if I am, please
feel free to enlighten me.

You don't have enough kernel activity to account for 14% of a cpu. Have you checked whether there's another thread within the process that's doing something in userspace?

Chris

--
Chris Friesen
Software Developer
GENBAND
chris.friesen@xxxxxxxxxxx
www.genband.com
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