bleak_house 3 tells you your leaks

September 25, 2007 By in Uncategorized 21 Comments

BleakHouse 3:

  ...
  58%: core rails (783 births, 1241 deaths, ratio -0.23, impact 1.66)
  66%: recipe/new/GET (15182 births, 14593 deaths, ratio 0.02, impact 1.77)
  75%: core rails (766 births, 1168 deaths, ratio -0.21, impact 1.60)
  83%: recipe/list/GET (16423 births, 15991 deaths, ratio 0.01, impact 1.64)

65992 births, 66458 deaths.

Tags sorted by immortal leaks:
  recipe/show/GET leaks, averaged over 4 requests:
    5599 String
    80 Array
    2 Regexp
    2 MatchData
    2 Hash
    1 Symbol
    ...
  core rails leaks, averaged over 4 requests:
    238 String
    10 Array

Tags sorted by impact * ratio:
   0.0739: recipe/show/GET
   0.0350: recipe/new/GET
   0.0218: recipe/list/GET
  -0.6686: core rails

That’s a Symbol up there; the new BleakHouse walks the sym_tbl as well as the regular heap. We now track the history of every individual object instead of just class counts. This means we can accurately (fingers crossed) identify where lingering objects were spawned.

On the flipside, analyzing the log file is slow (a decent-sized logfile will have hundreds of millions of rows). I wrote a pure-C CSV parser, which helps, and there’s always the “better hardware” answer. I’ve been mainly running it on my Mac Mini; if I use the Opteron 2210 it goes much faster, since the analyzer is CPU-bound.

It doesn’t make pretty graphs anymore but I’m not sure exactly how they would help. It would be easy enough to add them back.

go go go

A gem, not a plugin, because it needs to compile a C extension. First, uninstall the old versions to prevent version problems:

sudo gem uninstall bleak_house -a -i -x

Now:

sudo gem install bleak_house

Also, you need to rebuild your ruby-bleak-house binary, even if you already have one. Just run:

bleak --build

The RDoc has updated usage instructions.

21 responses

  1. I think the RubyGem mirrors may be behind. It shows up when searching

    $ gem search –r bleak_house* REMOTE GEMS *
Bulk updating Gem source index for: 
http://gems.rubyforge.orgbleak_house (7.1, 7, 6, 5.3, 5.2, 5.1, 5, 3.1, 3.0.2, 3)

    But fails to install…

    $ sudo gem install –r bleak_house –v 3.0.2
ERROR:  While executing gem … (OpenURI::HTTPError) 
   404 Not Found

    Come on Rubyforge! I only have so long on lunch!

  5. Karl: Use the direct links to the two gems, above. 3.2 is the latest. I’ve filed a Rubyforge ticket about the mirrors being messed up.

    Martha: Soon ;)

  8. Evan: Line 42 in build.rb is a tiny bit mangled:

    exec(“rm #{binary}; cp ./ruby #{binary}; 
chmod–755 #{binary}; echoe \”  Done\"")

    chmod doesn’t need ‘–’ and echoe is the olde fashioned command, nowe deprecated :)One other thing, wget doesn’t exist on my mac–no prob, I modded it to use curl–but you might want to use curl by default.

  11. Ah; crap; ld is trying to link against the generic ruby binary rather than the ruby-bleak-house one.

    I’ll figure something out.

  12. Actually, it looks like you’re using Leopard? I don’t know how to fix compilation against the bundled package (also, I don’t have Leopard). If you install Ruby from MacPorts you should be ok.

  13. Just thought I’d tell you that on my system (Ubuntu) I had to remove the ‘&’ characters from the system calls in “/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/bleakhouse-3.2/lib/bleakhouse/support/build.rb” to be able to use “bleak—build”. The ‘&’ forks the command so that the script continues without waiting for the command to complete, which causes the following commands to fail.

  18. Hmm, well, I definitely can’t reproduce it. What does ruby –e ‘puts `env | grep SHELL`’ say? And perhaps bash —version?

    I changed the &> in BleakHouse 3.3 to > and 2>&1; maybe that will work better for you.

  19. I think that it might have to do with leopard building things universal by default… I’m not sure. But even with ARCHFLAGS=”-i386″ it’s not happy. 

    suzaku:~ travis$ ruby-bleak-house
require 'rbconfig'
-:1:in `require': no such file to load -- rbconfig (LoadError)
	from -:1

  20. I’m getting this error when trying to use it with Rails Edge:

    /var/www/apps/XXXX/releases/20071130025107/vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/
  active_support/core_ext/module/aliasing.rb:31:in
`alias_method': undefined method `process' for class `Class' (NameError)
	from /var/www/apps/XXXX/releases/20071130025107/vendor/rails/
activesupport/lib/active_support/core_ext/module/aliasing.rb:31:in
`alias_method_chain'
	from /usr/lib64/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/bleak_house-3.5.1/lib/bleak_house/
          rails/action_controller.rb:9

    Any ideas?