Profiling Memory Usage

Profiling the memory usage can be useful for finding out why a program appears to use more memory than it should. It is especially helpful for analyzing OOM situations or other cases where the memory grows linearly and causes problems.

To profile the memory usage of a program, there are multiple options. The following sections describe the methods that are available.

If a problem in memory usage is identified and it appears to be due to a bug, please open a new bug report on the MariaDB Jira under the correct project and include the relevant memory profiling output in it. Refer to How to Write a Good Bug Report for more details.

Known issues that can cause extended memory usage

Transparent huge pages (THP)

Transparent huge pages (THP), which is enabled by default in many newer Linux distributions, can cause out-of-memory-issues for MariaDB as THP is not suitable for databases. This is described at MDEV-33279.

MariaDB 10.6.17 and all other MariaDB server releases after 2024-01-19 have THP disabled.

System malloc is not good if there are a lot of allocations of different size.

If Memory_used and information_schema.processlist do not show a growth of memory but the process still increases in size, then a likely problem is the system memory allocation library (malloc). Replacing malloc with tcmalloc or jemalloc should in this case fix the issue.

Profiling with the MariaDB server

Recent MariaDB versions have a global variable Memory_used that shows how much memory the MariaDB server has allocated. By monitoring this variable one can find out if if the MariaDB allocated memory grows.

One can also check memory usage per user with information_schema.processlist:

select id, MEMORY_USED, MAX_MEMORY_USED from information_schema.processlist;

This shows the current memory used per connection and the maximum memory they have used since the user connected.

The Performance Schema can also be used to find out who is allocated memory and for what.

Note that one can also set the max_session_mem_used variable to restrict a user's memory usage.

BPF Compiler Collection (bcc)

The BPF Compiler Collection (bcc) toolkit comes with the memleak program that traces outstanding memory allocations. This is a very convenient way of debugging high memory usage as it'll immediately show where the memory is allocated at.

By default the tool will print output once every five seconds with the stacktraces that have the most open allocations. Ctrl+C can be used to interrupt the collection of the traces.

The profiling interval and the profiling duration can be passed as arguments to memleak. The first argument is how often a sample is taken and the second argument is how long to sample for. To help analyze excessive memory usage, collect the output of the memleak program for at least 60 seconds. The longer the profiling can be left on, the more accurate the information will be.

The overhead of the profiling can be large enough that it affects production workloads negatively. To reduce the overhead, the sampling frequency of memory allocations can be lowered using the --sample-rate option:

  -s SAMPLE_RATE, --sample-rate SAMPLE_RATE
                        sample every N-th allocation to decrease the overhead

For example, -s 10 will sample only 10% of memory allocations which may miss out memory leaks from individual allocations but the longer the system is left running, the more likely it is that a leaking memory allocation is sampled. This means that even with a lower sampling rate, the source of the memory leak will eventually be found.

RHEL, CentOS, Rocky Linux and Fedora

On RHEL based systems, the package is named bcc-tools. After installing it, use the following command to profile the memory usage 5 times per second over a window of 60 seconds:

sudo /usr/share/bcc/tools/memleak -p $(pidof mariadbd) 5 60 | tee memleak.log

Ubuntu and Debian

On Ubuntu/Debian the package is named bpfcc-tools. After installing it, use the following command to profile the memory usage 5 times per second over a window of 60 seconds:

sudo memleak-bpfcc -p $(pidof mariadbd) 5 60 | tee memleak.log

Jemalloc Heap Profiling

Jemalloc is an alternative to the default glibc memory allocator. It is capable of analyzing the heap memory usage of a process which allows it to be used to detect all sorts of memory usage problems with a lower overhead compared to tools like Valgrind. Unlike the ASAN and LSAN sanitizers, it is capable of detecting cases where memory doesn't actually leak but keeps growing with no upper limit (e.g. items get appended to a list but are never removed).

Ubuntu and Debian

To enable jemalloc, the packages for it must be first installed from the system repositories. Ubuntu 20.04 requires the following packages to be installed for jemalloc profiling:

apt-get -y install libjemalloc2 libjemalloc-dev binutils

RHEL, CentOS, Rocky Linux and Fedora

The version of jemalloc that is available in most Red Hat repositories is not compiled with memory profiling support enabled. For RHEL based distributions, the only option is to build jemalloc from source.

Configuring Jemalloc for Heap Profiling

Once installed, edit the systemd service file with systemctl edit mariadb.service and add the following lines into it. The path to the libjemalloc.so file is OS-specific so make sure it points to the correct file. The example here is for Ubuntu and Debian environments.

[Service]
Environment=MALLOC_CONF=prof:true,prof_leak:true,prof_gdump:true,lg_prof_sample:18,prof_prefix:/var/lib/mysql/jeprof/jeprof
Environment=LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libjemalloc.so.2

Then create the directory for the profile files:

mkdir /var/lib/mysql/jeprof/
chown mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql/jeprof/

And finally restart MariaDB with systemctl restart mariadb.service.

The directory in /var/lib/mysql/jeprof/ will start to be filled by versioned files with a .heap suffix. Every time the virtual memory usage reaches a new high, a file will be created. Initially, the files will be created very often but eventually the pace will slow down. Once the problematic memory usage has been identified, the latest .heap file can be analyzed with the jeprof program.

The simplest method is to generate a text report with the following command.

jeprof --txt /usr/sbin/mariadbd $(ls -1 /var/lib/mysql/jeprof/*.heap|sort -V|tail -n 1) > heap-report.txt

A better way to look at the generated heap profile is with the PDF output. However, this requires the installation of extra packages (apt -y install graphviz ghostscript gv). To generate the PDF report of the latest heap dump, run the following command:

jeprof --pdf /usr/sbin/mariadbd $(ls -1 /var/lib/mysql/jeprof/*.heap|sort -V|tail -n 1) > heap-report.pdf

The generated heap-report.pdf will contain a breakdown of the memory usage.

Note that the report generation with the jeprof program must be done on the same system where the profiling was done. If done elsewhere, the binaries do not necessarily match and can cause the report generation to fail.

Tcmalloc Heap Profiling

Similarly to the jemalloc memory allocator, the tcmalloc memory allocator comes with a leak checker and heap profiler.

Installation

RHEL, CentOS and Rocky Linux

On RHEL based systems, the gperftools package is in the EPEL repositories. These must be first enabled by installing the epel-release package.

sudo dnf -y install epel-release

After this, the gperftools package can be installed.

sudo dnf -y install gperftools

Ubuntu 20.04

sudo apt -y install google-perftools

Service file configuration

Once tcmalloc is installed, edit the systemd service file with systemctl edit mariadb.service and add the following lines into it.

[Service]
Environment=LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtcmalloc_and_profiler.so.4
Environment=HEAPPROFILE=/var/lib/mysql/pprof/mariadbd.prof
Environment=HEAPCHECK=normal
Environment=HEAP_CHECK_AFTER_DESTRUCTORS=true

Then create the directory for the profile files:

mkdir /var/lib/mysql/pprof/
chown mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql/pprof/

And finally restart MariaDB with systemctl restart mariadb.service.

Configuring Heap Dump Frequency

The heap profiling is configured using environment variables. The details can be found in the Modifying Runtime Behavior section of the gperftools documentation: https://gperftools.github.io/gperftools/heapprofile.html

By default, tcmalloc dumps the heap profile every time 1GiB of memory has been allocated (HEAP_PROFILE_ALLOCATION_INTERVAL) or whenever the high-water memory usage mark increases by 100MiB (HEAP_PROFILE_INUSE_INTERVAL). If there's no activity, no memory dumps will be generated.

To trigger a memory dump based on a time interval, set the HEAP_PROFILE_TIME_INTERVAL environment variable to the number of seconds between each dump. For example, with Environment=HEAP_PROFILE_TIME_INTERVAL=3600 there will be one heap dump per hour.

Report generation

Depending on which OS you are using, the report generation program is named either pprof (RHEL) or google-pprof (Debian/Ubuntu).

It is important to pick the latest .heap file to analyze. The following command generates the heap-report.pdf from the latest heap dump. The file will show the breakdown of the memory usage.

pprof --pdf /usr/sbin/mariadbd $(ls /var/lib/mysql/pprof/*.heap|sort -V|tail -n 1) > heap-report.pdf

See also

• Using MariaDB with tcmalloc or jemalloc