Debugging

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This article/section is a stub — probably a pile of half-sorted notes and is probably a first version, is not well-checked, so may have incorrect bits. (Feel free to ignore, or tell me)

What-does-it-spit-out debugging

print statements

Yes, you can use an IDE that hooks into the execution environment and allows you do step lines at a time and sees what happens in memory. Yes, that is sometimes necessary.


But for most bugs, just print statement is simple, effective.

...though if this is something that might regress, consider doing it via logging instead - it makes it easier to filter the output, to check it after the fact, and it's handier when debugging is likelier to happen via helpdesks rather than the programmer who wrote the thing.


checking that invariants are actually invariant

strace

This article/section is a stub — probably a pile of half-sorted notes and is probably a first version, is not well-checked, so may have incorrect bits. (Feel free to ignore, or tell me)


A trace of system calls: finds syscalls a program makes, prints to stderr as they happen, no instrumentation/alteration of your program necessary.


For example, things file related will use fstat and probably open - so you can see what files are being accessed - and you can see reads and writes, sockets opening and closing, and such.

Good for certain debugging when programs don't say enough, decent for certain workload characterization for things that seem slow.


strace can run a command for you, or you can attach to a running process via its PID (-p)

For things that fork off, you'll want -f to follow that.

To compare time spent in each syscall, use -c.


You can filter what syscalls are reported using their names, and with a few existing categorizations:

  • file: any file-related calls (access, state, read, write, etc.)
  • desc: file descriptor related
  • process: process management, e.g. fork, wait,l exec
  • network
  • signal
  • ipc
  • memory


For example:

# only mention open() calls
strace -eopen,openat ls     
# see whether there are a bulk of stat()s done (for how many, use -c)
strace -estat,fstat,lstat,newfstatat  find /tmp
# see what progrms are invoked
strace -f -eprocess  service apache2 status 
# summarize time spent in each syscall
strace -c  ls -l /proc


# comparing e.g. ls on small and large dirs
strace -c ls -l /data/largedir

For example, say you notice that ls -l seems to do a lot of lgetxattr()s. -c would show that for large directories getdents dwarfs everything, and in general it's nearly free assuming that you've just lstat()ted.



Logging

System logging

Windows Event Log

Live debugging

From the IDE

Terms

  • Step into: Go into the called function's workings. (does the same as 'over' if not a call)
  • Step over: Perform evaluation/call, but don't go into it, and don't display ("I trust this, give me the next thing at the current level")
  • Step out: "I've seen enough of this function's guts, go (back) to its caller."

Note: while 'over' may suggest skipping code execution, none of the options skip execution - it just means skipping its debugger display.


Debug and performance inspection tools

ltrace

An execution shim that shows calls into shared libraries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ltrace

pcstat

Page Cache statistics

For individual files, find how much is in the page cache

See also :



echo l > /proc/sysrq-trigger

...gives the backtrace for what's on each CPU.

Writes it to dmesg, which often also goes to something like kern.log, syslog / messages

kernel profiler sources

kprobes

(kernel functions)


kernel tracepoints

dtrace

userspace profiler sources

uprobes

(userspace functions)

USDT (Userland Statically Defined Tracing)

A way of embedding dtrace probes into an app


LTTng userspace

profiler tools / frontends

(Note that some basic things can be gotten from /proc)


dtrace (solaris, also freebsd, linux, osx, smartos)

Very cool tools originating on Solaris.

The rest are ports, some close to the Solaris version, some further away.


perf (linux)

a.k.a. perf_events, since 2.6 kernels.

It basically abstracted away hardware when doing performance counting/measurements.


It also introduced a few CLI tools that are easier to use than many that came before.



https://perf.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Tutorial

http://www.brendangregg.com/perf.html

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-07-03/perf-counting.html

https://github.com/brendangregg/perf-tools.git

systemtap (linux)

systemtap seems to imitate dtrace decently


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SystemTap

https://sourceware.org/systemtap/

https://sourceware.org/systemtap/tutorial.pdf

ptrace

ftrace

BPF (linux, bsd, more?)

This article/section is a stub — probably a pile of half-sorted notes and is probably a first version, is not well-checked, so may have incorrect bits. (Feel free to ignore, or tell me)

extended Berkeley Packet Filter ('eBPF, often just BPF) originated in network packet filtering, but grew so flexible that it is also very useful for system tracing (and never got a new name).

It compiles user requests into sandboxed bytecode to be run in the kernel, which makes it a mix of safe, flexible, and fast.



See also:

  • BPF Compiler Collection makes it easier to use the mechanisms, and to bolt scripts on top of that. Has various examples.
  • bpftrace bolts a language on top of bcc and more
(compiled at runtime so requires kernel headers, and compiler)

https://tmpout.sh/2/4.html

LTTng

OProfile

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OProfile

Unsorted

Instruments (osx)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruments_(software)

Xperf (windows)

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ntdebugging/2008/04/03/windows-performance-toolkit-xperf/


flame graphs

This article/section is a stub — probably a pile of half-sorted notes and is probably a first version, is not well-checked, so may have incorrect bits. (Feel free to ignore, or tell me)

For context (though I think they came later): Firefox and Chrome has Flame Charts, which basically just stack over time. Since this is usually shown at a scale useful to find code that slow down the framerate, and JS is single-threaded, this tends to look fairly clean.


CPU flame graphs instead are primarily geared to show how common a particular stack is.

While it does not show a timeline (x axis is sorted alphabetically), or really collect amount of time spent, the amount of times the sample mentions the specific function is still a good indication of where most time is spent (particularly when things are unusually slow, which often means one function is dominating).

It's regularly used with statistical profiling, which takes samples frequently enough (though ideally not in step with anything else), which for specific functions is more approximate than cycle-accurate profiling , but can be a more real-world-accurate view of the general execution due to the profiling having minimal impact itself (on CPU, but also cache).


The file format is basically just lines of (verify)

stackframe;stackframe;stackframe count

Notes:

  • the count is technically optional, but whenever you can aggregate it can make these files a lot shorter.
  • a second count column is used for the differential variant
  • variants use some annotation on the function name
  • See flamegraph.pl's comments for more detail


It was recently popularized by Brendan Gregg, who specializes in digging into lower levels of system so there are various relevant tools for kernel use, like syscalls or network efficiency - basically scripts that use dtrace, perf, SystemTap, etc.

Various runtimes can also output things useful for these.

There is sometimes value to producing them from code, e.g. get a better idea of database use with entries like stack;SQL milliseconds


Variations on the theme:

  • Off-CPU flame graphs - intercept mainly the syscalls related to why something is not scheduled for CPU, such as general scheduling, IO,
  • Hot/Cold flame graphs - combine CPU and Off-CPU, to get an indication of how a program is scheduled
  • Memory flame graph flame graphs - intercept mainly the syscalls related to memory allocation
  • differential flame graphs - mainly meant to indicate performance regressions/improvements; takes two CPU flame graphs, and show changes in time spent
since color is based on newstackvalue-oldstackvalue, this has issues like renames making things disappear


The original tool is [1], and see also [2], and there are various that imitate it, like [https://www.npmjs.com/package/stackvis stackvis]

http://www.brendangregg.com/flamegraphs.html



Unsorted

http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/

NVidia profiler tools

Post-mortem debugging

Debug symbols

GNU debugger (gdb)

Unsorted