Difference Between Perf Data Reported by Different Tools – 4

maoni

.NET CLR Memory\% Time in GC counter and !runaway on thread(s) doing GC.

The 2 common ways people use to look at the time spent in GC are the % Time in GC performance counter under .NET CLR Memory, and the CPU time displayed by the !runaway debugger command in cdb/windbg. What do they mean exactly? % Time in GC is calculated like this:

When the nthGC starts (ie, after the managed threads are suspended and before the GC work starts), we record the timestamp at that time. Let’s call this TA(n);

When nth GC ends (ie, after the GC work is done and before we resume the managed threads), we record another timestamp. Let’s call this TB(n);

So Time spent in this GC is TB(n) – TA(n). And the time since the last GC ended is TB(n) – TB(n-1). So % Time in GC is (TB(n) – TA(n)) / (TB(n) – TB(n-1)).

Since we only record the timestamps we don’t actually discount the time when the thread was switched out – for example, if you are on a single proc machine and another process has a thread of the same priority (as the thread that’s doing GC) that’s also ready to run it may take away some time from the thread that’s doing the GC. None the less it’s a good approximation.

One common scenario where it’s not a good approximation is when paging occurs. In this case you will see a very high % Time in GC but really the time that’s actually spent doing GC work is low ‘cause most of the time is spent doing IO. To verify if you hit this case you can look at the Memory\Pages/sec to see how much it’s paging.

!runaway is more accurate in the sense that it does record the actual time spent on the threads. However I did observe 2 common mistakes when using !runaway to look at time spent in GC.

1) mistake “time spent on the GC thread(s)” as “time spent in GC”.

Let’s take Server GC as an example. When a GC is needed the GC threads first perform the suspension work. Obviously this takes time. Sometimes it can take quite a bit time if you have many threads or some threads get stuck and it takes a long time to suspend them.

2) using the current !runaway output to judge how much time GC has taken without taking into count that some user threads have died. Besides looking at the User/Kernel Mode time you may want to also look at Elapsed Time. The following output is from one of the issues I looked at:

Elapsed Time

  Thread       Time

   0:2094      0 days 11:57:10.406

   1:2098      0 days 11:57:10.152

   2:2044      0 days 11:57:09.898

   3:27cc      0 days 11:57:09.882

   4:20c0      0 days 11:57:09.597

  13:810       0 days 11:57:09.565

  12:21d4      0 days 11:57:09.565

  11:2308      0 days 11:57:09.565

  10:1d24      0 days 11:57:09.565

   9:23e0      0 days 11:57:09.565

   8:24d0      0 days 11:57:09.565

   7:2168      0 days 11:57:09.565

   6:2134      0 days 11:57:09.565

   5:2124      0 days 11:57:09.565

  14:570       0 days 11:57:08.582

  15:10fc      0 days 11:57:00.000

  16:1ac4      0 days 11:56:58.256

  17:1900      0 days 11:56:58.176

  18:1624      0 days 11:56:57.494

  19:11f8      0 days 10:35:01.881

  21:1620      0 days 0:41:45.017

  22:1cc8      0 days 0:37:30.496

  23:2de0      0 days 0:29:01.820

  24:2e10      0 days 0:29:01.711

  25:2d88      0 days 0:22:26.988

  26:1668      0 days 0:19:26.175

  27:2cb0      0 days 0:16:16.814

  29:2d1c      0 days 0:11:53.779

  28:1de8      0 days 0:11:53.779

  30:2ed4      0 days 0:11:35.466

  32:2030      0 days 0:11:22.544

  31:2084      0 days 0:11:22.544

  33:12b0      0 days 0:07:53.510

  35:28e4      0 days 0:03:13.801

  34:2654      0 days 0:03:13.801

  36:2d68      0 days 0:02:31.988

 

The orange lines are GC threads. They were created about 12 hours ago. The green lines are user threads and they were created 2 mins to 40mins ago. So naturally at the current state these user threads couldn’t’ve spent much time.

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