Original distribution site : https://github.com/shibatch/oomstaller
Modern computers have many CPU cores, but in order to use them effectively, a lot of memory is sometimes required. When building a large application, the build time can become very long due to lack of memory. Usually, most processes in the build do not require much memory, but a very small portion of the build requires a large amount of memory. If swapping occurs when performing those processes, the build will take an extremely long time to complete. This problem can be avoided by setting the number of CPU cores used for builds to a small number, but this is a waste of valuable CPU. Also, there is no good way to know the best number of CPU cores to use beforehand.
This tool monitors the memory usage of each process when performing a build, and suspends processes as necessary to prevent swap thrashing from occurring. This allows you to build using all CPU cores without worrying about swap thrashing.
Thrashing is a situation in which a CPU takes longer to perform swapping than the process that the CPU would normally perform if there were sufficient memory. When thrashing is occurring, it takes longer to respond to user input because the memory for not only the process taking up the most memory but also the memory for other processes is swapped out. In addition, the OS may kill the process that is occupying the largest amount of memory, which can make the system unstable.
When thrashing occurs while multiple processes are running in parallel, the OS may swap out the memory of one running process to free up the physical memory needed for the other processes to continue execution. However, even after swapping out the memory of the running process, the swapped-out memory is soon needed again to continue execution of that process, resulting in a state of frequent swap-in/swap-out.
To avoid this situation, this tool suspends part of processes and stops their execution completely. This ensures that once the memory for a process is swapped out, it will not be swapped in again until its execution is resumed, and processes that are still running can continue their execution with the necessary physical memory allocated. Because the advantage of not having to swap frequently is much greater than the disadvantage of some CPU cores not being utilized, this tool can reduce the total execution time compared to when thrashing is occurring.
When selecting which processes to suspend and which to execute, priority is given first to the execution of the process occupying the largest amount of memory. The process occupying the largest amount of memory will not be suspended under any circumstances. The remaining running processes are selected based on the time when the process started running. The earlier a process is started, the more priority it will be given to execution. This avoids the same process being suspended and resumed repeatedly, disrupting the build order, or suspending processes that are crucial to the build.
The target processes to be suspended are selected by referencing the parent-child relationship of the processes. Only processes that are descendants of the command invoked as an argument of oomstaller will be suspended, thus processes that are not related to the build will never be suspended. It does not require information about which processes are involved in the build, and can reliably control only the processes involved in the build.
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Check out the source code from our GitHub repository :
git clone https://github.com/shibatch/oomstaller -
Run make :
cd oomstaller && make
oomstaller [<options>] command [arg] ...
This tool monitors the memory usage of each process when performing a build, and suspends processes as necessary to prevent swapping from occurring.
To perform a build using this tool, specify make or ninja as the argument of this tool and execute as follows.
oomstaller make -j `nproc`
--thres <percentage> default: 75.0
This tool suspends processes so that memory usage by running build processes does not exceed the specified percentage of available memory.
--max-parallel <number of processes> default: 0
Suspends processes so that the number of running build processes does not exceed the specified number. 0 means no limit. A process is counted as one process even if it has multiple threads.
--period <seconds> default: 1.0
Specifies the interval at which memory usage of each process is checked and processes are controlled.
--thrash <minimum available memory (MB)> default: 256.0
If the amount of available memory falls below the specified value, it is assumed that swap thrashing is occurring.
Lowering the value of --thres results in increased time where some cores are not used in order to reduce memory usage. Increasing this value too much would increase the time where only one process can run due to swap thrashing.
When the available memory is less than the value set by --thrash option, oomstaller assumes that swap thrashing is occurring and suspends all processes except the process occupying the largest amount of memory. This has the effect of minimizing swapping. The detection of swap thrashing can be disabled by specifying 0 with --thrash option. This allows more processes to run with aggressive swapping, which may reduce build time, but may require large amounts of swap space.
We recommend specifying "-j `nproc`" option to ninja. ninja usually runs jobs with more threads than CPU cores. This is effective to reduce build time if there is sufficient memory. However, this will only consume extra memory in situations where there is not enough memory in which you might want to use this tool.
If you kill this tool with SIGKILL, a large number of build processes will remain suspended with SIGSTOP. To prevent this from happening, use SIGTERM or SIGINT to kill this tool. You can send SIGCONT to all processes run by you with the following command.
killall -v -s CONT -u $USER -r '.*'
The software is distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. See accompanying file LICENSE.txt or copy at : http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt.
Contributions to this project are accepted under the same license.
The fact that this software is released under an open source license only means that you can use the current version of the software for free. If you want this software to be maintained, you need to financially support the project. Please see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.
Copyright Naoki Shibata 2024.