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Performance issues with extension running longer periods of time #7

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jure opened this issue Jul 3, 2014 · 12 comments
Open

Performance issues with extension running longer periods of time #7

jure opened this issue Jul 3, 2014 · 12 comments

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@jure
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jure commented Jul 3, 2014

Relevant issues:

peers/peerjs#218
tsujio/webrtc-chord#6

It appears there is a "bug" in Chrome, which does not garbage collect any PeerConnection that's created in the history of runtime, even if you close() it. This results in 100% CPU usage and gigs of memory being used after a short while of running Scholar Ninja, which opens thousands of connections in that time.

This behaviour is supposedly according to spec:
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=356605
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=373690

Ideas about how to solve it are welcome.

One I've thought about is just reloading the backround.js every x seconds, to force garbage collection of all previous connections. Obviously not ideal, as you leave and than join the network again, increasing the churn rate artificially (and it's already plenty high)

@blahah
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blahah commented Jul 3, 2014

What if you force garbage collection? Does it still not get collected?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13950394/forcing-garbage-collection-in-google-chrome

@jure
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jure commented Jul 3, 2014

Even if it did, it would be very impractical to force users to use a command line flag to startup their browser.

Luckily, I won't have to debug this any further, I hope. It seems that this bug has been resolved in https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=373690, about 2 weeks ago. I'm testing it right now.

@blahah
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blahah commented Jul 4, 2014

OK yeah that was dumb - I didn't read the SO answers carefully enough (just googled to see if manually triggering GC was possible).

Great to see the bug is being fixed upstream.

@jure
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jure commented Jul 6, 2014

Based on some comments from @juberti, it looks like this particular fix will be landing in stable (Chrome 37) somewhere in September. The more I think about it and the more I consider the 20 currently running peers at 100% CPU right now, the more I think that forcing a refresh of the background page every X hours is not a terrible idea. Cycle chord.leave and chord.join and we're good again.

I have to say that I'm seeing 100% CPU after a while with latest Chromium build too, which supposedly already contains this fix. Not sure exactly what's going on there, but it looks like the same pathology as with current Chrome:

  • script, according to the timeline, isn't doing anything, 99% idle
  • profiler says 10 MB of memory,
  • Chromium helper is using gigs of memory and 100% CPU.

So it's likely I'm doing something wrong which is preventing garbage collection of the connections, but on the other hand, maybe this aspect of the issue has not been fixed.

@juberti
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juberti commented Jul 6, 2014

Lack of GC should cause mem bloat but not CPU. If it is chewing CPU it must
be something else.

A chrome tracing dump on the helper process would be helpful.
On Jul 6, 2014 8:03 PM, "Jure Triglav" notifications@github.com wrote:

Based on some comments from @juberti https://github.com/juberti, it
looks like this particular fix will be landing in stable (Chrome 37)
somewhere in September. The more I think about it and the more I consider
the 20 currently running peers at 100% CPU right now, the more I think that
forcing a refresh of the background page every X hours is not a terrible
idea. Cycle chord.leave and chord.join and we're good again.

I have to say that I'm seeing 100% CPU after a while with latest Chromium
build too, which supposedly already contains this fix. Not sure exactly
what's going on there, but it looks like the same pathology as with current
Chrome:

  • script, according to the timeline, isn't doing anything, 99% idle
  • profiler says 10 MB of memory,
  • Chromium helper is using gigs of memory and 100% CPU.

So it's likely I'm doing something wrong which is preventing garbage
collection of the connections, but on the other hand, maybe this aspect of
the issue has not been fixed.


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#7 (comment)
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@jure
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jure commented Jul 7, 2014

@juberti: Those were my general thoughts as well, but I don't know the internals of Chrome at all.

What I see is increasing CPU utilization when running a script, I have a fairly simplified replication of it in this gist: https://gist.github.com/jure/1da505b52bc8d1d33675

And a bit more description: It's a simple script where 2 peers join and then they disconnect. After a very short while (seconds), Chrome is using 3,5 GB of memory and 100% CPU. If you profile the script, it looks like nothing unusual is going on and the stack size is just over 8 MB. Even weirder is that even if you pause execution of the JavaScript, CPU usage and memory usage remain equally high.

@juberti let me know what you need and I'll gladly provide it. How do I generate a Chrome tracing dump?

@jure
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jure commented Jul 7, 2014

@juberti, at the point when CPU is at 100% (after running Scholar Ninja for a while) I did a spindump, sampling (using activity monitor) and a trace using Xcode's Instruments and the Counter tool: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pyudb9ab389hcy0/Chromium-trace.zip

image

As you can see, the script is not really doing much at this point:
image

The same mechanic is present as previously (there is a big difference in memory usage though, Chromium uses a lot less of it, presumably because of the fix): If I pause script execution in the developer's console, CPU remains at 100%. Only if I disable the extension (or close the tab running the test) does CPU usage drop back to normal.

Hope this elucidates the nature of this problem a bit more.

@jure
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jure commented Jul 7, 2014

Looking at other issues on Chromium, I guess you really meant the chrome://tracing trace, so here it is:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jz36vu9a8whjblx/trace.json.zip

Looks like the libjingle worker thread is in overdrive.

@juberti
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juberti commented Jul 7, 2014

Can you file a chromium bug on this? I think this is a different issue.
On Jul 7, 2014 10:47 PM, "Jure Triglav" notifications@github.com wrote:

Looking at other issues on Chromium, I guess you really meant the
chrome://tracing trace, so here it is:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jz36vu9a8whjblx/trace.json.zip

Looks like the libjingle worker thread is in overdrive.


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#7 (comment)
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@jure
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jure commented Jul 9, 2014

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=392651&thanks=392651&ts=1404944415

@juberti: Let me know if there's anything more I can do. I'm not experienced with Chromium bug reporting.

jure added a commit that referenced this issue Jul 16, 2014
… they should be different. Introduce a hacky way of keeping CPU usage low, keeps reloading the background page every hour (issue #7). Have a way of letting other modules know that dht.js has joined the network (so things like restoring documents from cache can happen).
@yarikoptic
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is ScholarNinja still kicking? sad to see it leave :-(

@jure
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jure commented Sep 20, 2015

It's not dead, but it's not particularly alive either. I haven't tested the current situation, but I would expect that performance issues with lots of WebRTC connections in both Firefox and Chrome are now non-existent, or at least significantly reduced. Might be worth trying the experiment again!

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