On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 12:32 AM, Howard Chu <hyc@symas.com> wrote:

Jeffrey Crawford wrote:

We are using openldap 2.4.26 with BDB 4.8 and have replication set up in
mirror mode for our main ldap database. There are a couple of other replicas
that have a subset of the data that the main cluster has but we are seeing the
following behavior on all of them.

When performing mass updates via LDAP, lets say on the order of 30,000 entries
being added to existing entries. We've noticed that the CPU use of the slapd
instances goes through the roof (between 65% and 95% continuously), and seems
to stay there until it is restarted.

When the CPU usage goes high like that it should be pretty easy to see where it's going, by getting a gdb stack trace of the running process.

At a guess, based on the minimal amount of information here, you've run into the glibc malloc fragmentation issue, and switching to tcmalloc might avoid the problem.

Fair enough doesn't look like gperftools are a package in FreeBSD so we'll have to do a manual install but it looks like this would be the easiest and logical first step to just "see if this fixes things"

Just for reference we would want to set LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/libtcmalloc_minimal.so and not try to compile OpenLDAP against it right?

The Problem is that this system has to be highly available, even for writing
and when these updates "shock" the system, the response time goes way down
when the process are turning like that. I don't think they are trying to catch
up to the data changes because if I let them run a while after the updates are
done. (Talking like 1hr) and then restart the instances, they go back to their
normal state.

If you have the SYNC loglevel enabled, it should be obvious whether update traffic is the cause or not.

I can try that but I don't think it is

So far the only way I've been able to mitigate the issues is to reconfigure
our ldap proxy instances to a machine that is having less trouble, restart the
instances that are chugging along, then repoint the proxies back to the one
just started, and start the others. Not exactly a quick operation.

I've played with cache settings for both OpenLDAP and BDB and have gotten the
frequency of this issue reduced but I can't seem to get rid of
it completely and it shows up quite often after large data manipulations. I'm
at a loss of how to debug since nothing is crashing. Any suggestions on how to
find out what's causing this would be very helpful. The logs are not throwing
any warnings or posting messages that would seem out of the ordinary and I
have played with the log settings but nothing seems to relate to anything that
might explain why we are seeing CPU usage to go so high.

I would suggest you try out back-mdb in RE24. MDB uses 1/4 the total memory of BDB and it performs far fewer mallocs, so glibc malloc fragmentation should not be a problem. (I would have suggested 2.4.30, but the ITS#7190 fix is rather important if you have large volumes of delete operations. The other MDB-related ITSs, #7191 and #7196, are only crucial for non-X86 and non-Linux platforms.)

Ugh this would get ugly, our institution frowns upon doing "special installs" and the back-mdb isn't part of the vendor (Yes FreeBSD is considered a vendor) install, not saying it can't be done but it feels like a Spanish inquisition when having to make a request like this. Of course none of you care about this ;)

--
-- Howard Chu
CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com
Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/