Using viewcore to analyze core dumps

Viewcore is a tool for analyzing and exploring the memory in Go core dumps that was originally created by the Go team. It’s useful for debugging memory leaks, reproducible OOM issues, and workloads that use more memory than expected. Here are some of its capabilities:

  • Understand how much memory is live, and how much is garbage

  • Understand which objects are taking up the most memory in the heap

  • Understand the types of objects in the heap

  • Browse the object graph and see all values within every object at the time of the core dump

  • Understand which objects are retaining an object, preventing it from being collected by the GC

  • See objects on the stacks of all goroutines

  • Visualize the retained object graph using pprof

To use viewcore, there are a few steps:

  1. Install viewcore

  2. Create a cockroach binary created with optimizations disabled for best results

  3. Create a core dump from a running cockroach that’s doing something interesting

  4. Run viewcore and explore the heap

When to use viewcore

You should use viewcore when studying OOMs or high memory behavior that is reproducible with synthetic data or workloads like TPCH or TPCC. Once you have an OOM that you can reproduce at will, you should induce the OOM condition, and get a core dump a little before the OOM would happen. At this point, spending some quality time staring at the core dump with viewcore will likely lead to revelations.

Some examples of bugs found with viewcore:

https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pull/66106

https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pull/65881

Do not try to get core dumps from customers! Core dumps should be treated as toxic waste, since they can contain arbitrarily sensitive, in-the-clear user data.

How to install viewcore

As of 2021, viewcore is not actively maintained by the Go team, and is completely broken for Go versions newer than Go 1.11. @Jordan Lewis developed some bugfixes and patches to improve matters, which are located here:

https://github.com/golang/debug/pull/7 (fixes to make viewcore work at all)

https://github.com/jordanlewis/debug/tree/crl-stuff (patches to make viewcore work with Cockroach, improved types and pprof visualizers)

You should download and install the code in the linked crl-stuff branch to use viewcore.

Create a cockroach binary with optimizations disabled

In order for viewcore to be able to accurately inspect the heap, it’s best to disable “compiler optimizations” and inlining, with the following invocation:

make build GOFLAGS="-gcflags=all='-N -l'"

The tool works without this special build, but not nearly as well, so given the chance you should use a special build to generate cores.

How to create a core dump

You need to be running on Linux to create a core dump. As of 2021, you cannot create a Go core dump on Mac.

The basic steps to create a Go core dump are as follows:

  1. ensure that your shell has ulimit -c unlimited set

  2. run Cockroach (or your other Go program) with the GOTRACEBACK=crash environment variable set, e.g.GOTRACEBACK=crash ./cockroach start-single-node --insecure

  3. Send a fatal signal to the program (that isn’t a SIGKILL), like this: killall -SIGSEGV cockroach. I like to use -SIGSEGV because it feels particularly evil, but I think other signals work too.

  4. You should see (core dumped) somewhere at the end of cockroach's stderr. If you don’t, it means you missed one of the first 2 steps.

  5. Now you should have a core file. Its location is defined by /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern.

On Roachprod

Roachprod makes it easy to collect a Go core dump. Steps 1 and 2 are already complete by default, and the core files are written to /mnt/data1/cores. So all you have to do is send -SIGSEGV to a cockroach that was invoked via roachprod start, and it’ll dump core.

Alternate approach: gcore

Instead of killing the process, you can use gcore/gdb to get the core dump. To do this:

  1. Install gdb with sudo apt-get install gdb

  2. Look up the pid of the cockroach process.

  3. sudo gcore -o /mnt/data1/cores $PID

Run Viewcore

Now you’re ready to viewcore! Invoke it like this to get the interactive prompt (and remember to make sure your core was generated with the passed in binary! You will get opaque errors otherwise):

viewcore path/to/core --exe path/to/binary

Once it loads, which might take a little while, run help for a command summary.

Note: there are a few slow operations in viewcore that might take seconds to minutes. They are all cached, so be patient if things are moving slowly. Things that are slow:

  1. On first load, the program runs a full “gc trace” of the entire heap to discover live and dead objects

  2. Operations that produce type information (like histogram or peek) need to type all GC roots and propagate typings through the entire heap

  3. Operations that allow introspection of what objects retain another need to produce the reverse edges map, another expensive full-heap iteration and map creation

breakdown

The breakdown command produces a high-level summary of the memory in the core. The key lines here are the live vs garbage quantities, which tell you how much actual data is reachable from GC roots (stack vars or global vars) and therefore not collectable, vs how much data is not reachable but hasn’t yet been collected.

(viewcore) breakdown all 5.4 GB 100.00% text 95 MB 1.77% readonly 60 MB 1.12% data 14 MB 0.26% bss 1.7 GB 30.84% (grab bag, includes OS thread stacks, ...) heap 3.4 GB 63.83% in use spans 141 MB 2.62% alloc 98 MB 1.83% live 67 MB 1.25% garbage 31 MB 0.57% free 42 MB 0.78% round 586 kB 0.01% manual spans 3.5 MB 0.07% (Go stacks) alloc 3.0 MB 0.06% free 508 kB 0.01% free spans 3.3 GB 61.14% retained 40 MB 0.75% (kept for reuse by Go) released 3.2 GB 60.39% (given back to the OS) ptr bitmap 113 MB 2.11% span table 3.5 MB 0.07%

histogram

Histogram produces a histogram of all types in the program sorted by total size. Pass the --top n argument to limit to the top n types.

(viewcore) histo --top 10 count size bytes live% sum% type 363 66 kB 24 MB 35.32 35.32 [65536]uint8 895 8.2 kB 7.3 MB 10.89 46.20 [1+1023?]float64 60 49 kB 2.9 MB 4.38 50.58 [6144]int64 2 1.0 MB 2.1 MB 3.11 53.70 [1048576]uint8 359 4.9 kB 1.7 MB 2.59 56.29 [1025+191?]int32 178 8.2 kB 1.5 MB 2.16 58.45 [1024]int 1 1.1 MB 1.1 MB 1.63 60.08 [1089]bucket<github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pkg/geo/geopb.SRID,github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pkg/geo/geoprojbase.ProjInfo> 2 524 kB 1.0 MB 1.56 61.64 [524288]uint8 4 262 kB 1.0 MB 1.56 63.20 [262144]uint8 16 41 kB 655 kB 0.97 64.17 github.com/cockroachdb/pebble/internal/record.block

peek

Peek (only in crl-stuff branch) takes a type and shows a breakdown of all object types that retain objects of the input type, and a breakdown of all object types that are retained by objects of the input type. This is somewhat akin to pprof’s peek.

(viewcore) peek github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pkg/col/coldata.Bytes count size bytes live% sum% type 371 64 B 24 kB 100.00 100.00 github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pkg/col/coldata.memColumn Total: 24 kB count size bytes live% sum% type 371 64 B 24 kB 100.00 100.00 github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/pkg/col/coldata.Bytes Total: 24 kB count size bytes live% sum% type 359 66 kB 24 MB 92.40 92.40 [65536]uint8 359 4.9 kB 1.7 MB 6.86 99.26 [1025+191?]int32 2 66 kB 131 kB 0.51 99.77 [65216+320?]uint8 2 20 kB 41 kB 0.16 99.93 [5120]int32 2 4.1 kB 8.2 kB 0.03 99.97 [4096]uint8 2 4.1 kB 8.2 kB 0.03 100.00 [1020+4?]int32 6 16 B 96 B 0.00 100.00 [4]int32 2 32 B 64 B 0.00 100.00 [8]int32 1 16 B 16 B 0.00 100.00 [16]uint8 1 16 B 16 B 0.00 100.00 [8+8?]uint8 Total: 26 MB

html

This command opens a webserver on localhost:8080 that allows graphical browsing of the objects in the heap. The types view allows seeing all objects of a particular type, goroutines allows browsing the stacks and stack vars of all goroutines, and globals allows browsing all global vars.

Each object page contains the values of all of its fields. Pointers are links to the pointed-at object pages. Object pages also contain reverse edges to all objects that retain them.

pprof

Running pprof output.pprof produces a fake pprof file that contains a “profile” that visualizes the object graph grouped by object type. Each “stack frame location” in the profile is a type, and there’s one “sample” per unique path through the object graph.

This command is very slow and uses a lot of memory, especially for heaps with a lot of objects. Sometimes, heaps have too many objects to feasibly explore via the pprof command - viewcore will let you know if this is true by using up all of the memory on your computer and getting oomkilled itself.

This produces a summary graph of the heap by type, like this:

 

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