Intermittent memcached pauses

Steven Grimm sgrimm at facebook.com
Tue Nov 7 22:24:50 UTC 2006


Are you by any chance using the "stats cachedump" or "stats sizes" 
commands? Both of those will pause the server while they run; they are 
intended for occasional debugging use rather than regular production use.

-Steve


Chris Hondl wrote:
>
> We've had memcached deployed at IMVU for about 9 months now.  It works 
> great, scales easily, never goes down, and totally saved us as traffic 
> on our site went up and up.
>
> We are now seeing a problem where one of our memcached hosts 
> periodically stops handling requests for several seconds.  This 
> particular host has a traffic pattern with about 30k get requests per 
> second, a small number of set requests, all data values stored are 
> small (booleans), and 90+% of the gets return a cache miss.
>
> Watching the machine it looks like it is actually memcached that is 
> experiencing the delays and using all of the CPU.  We tried disabling 
> all non-critical resources and still saw the pauses.  When we do see 
> CPU get used up for 3-5 seconds, typically the number of processes 
> waiting for time goes to 2 or 3 and if you look at top, the memcached 
> process CPU utilization goes from ~30% to 99+%.
>
> Has anyone else seen behavior like this?
>
> Chris
>
>
>
> Normal:
> top - 13:00:00 up 123 days, 14:02,  4 users,  load average: 0.36, 
> 0.52, 0.43
> Tasks:  51 total,   3 running,  48 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 22.3% us,  5.0% sy,  0.0% ni, 68.8% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  
> 4.0% si
> Mem:   3969768k total,   260392k used,  3709376k free,    22176k buffers
> Swap:  6144852k total,        0k used,  6144852k free,    60380k cached
>
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
> * 6465 root      16   0  108m  81m 1380 R 28.0  2.1   7:25.40 memcached*
>  6829 root      16   0  1876  928 1672 R  0.7  0.0   0:00.11 top
>     1 root      16   0  1504  512 1352 S  0.0  0.0   0:13.55 init
>
> Problem:
>
> top - 13:00:42 up 123 days, 14:03,  4 users,  load average: 0.31, 
> 0.49, 0.42
> Tasks:  52 total,   2 running,  50 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 98.3% us,  0.3% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  
> 1.3% si
> Mem:   3969768k total,   265136k used,  3704632k free,    22176k buffers
> Swap:  6144852k total,        0k used,  6144852k free,    60388k cached
>
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
> * 6465 root      20   0  110m  82m 1380 R 99.6  2.1   7:40.27 memcached*
>     1 root      16   0  1504  512 1352 S  0.0  0.0   0:13.55 init
>     2 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.04 ksoftirqd/0
>
>
>
>
> procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- 
> ----cpu----
>  r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us 
> sy id wa
>  2  0      0 3713424  22176  60332    0    0     0     0    0     0 
> 22  9 69  0
>  1  0      0 3713296  22176  60332    0    0     0     0    0     0 
> 23  9 68  0
>  2  0      0 3713360  22176  60332    0    0     0     0    0     0 22 
> 10 68  0
>  1  0      0 3713312  22176  60332    0    0     0     0    0     0 24 
> 10 66  0
>  1  0      0 3713312  22176  60332    0    0     0     0    0     0 22 
> 12 66  0
>  1  0      0 3713320  22176  60332    0    0     0     0    0     0 23 
> 11 66  0
>  1  0      0 3713320  22176  60332    0    0     0    25    0     0 
> 23  8 69  0
>  2  0      0 3713336  22176  60332    0    0     0    17    0     0 22 
> 10 68  0
>  1  0      0 3713400  22176  60332    0    0     0     0    0     0 25 
> 10 65  0
>  1  0      0 3713400  22176  60336    0    0     0     0    0     0 24 
> 10 66  0
>  1  0      0 3713400  22176  60336    0    0     0     0    0     0 
> 22  8 70  0
>  1  0      0 3713336  22176  60336    0    0     0     0    0     0 
> 24  8 68  0
>  1  0      0 3713272  22176  60336    0    0     0    24    0     0 22 
> 11 67  0
>  1  0      0 3713272  22176  60336    0    0     0     0    0     0 24 
> 10 66  0
>  1  0      0 3713208  22176  60336    0    0     0     0    0     0 
> 23  9 68  0
>  1  0      0 3713208  22176  60336    0    0     0     0    0     0 20 
> 10 70  0
> * 2  0      0 3711032  22176  60336    0    0     0     0    0     0 
> 73  2 25  0
>  2  0      0 3705720  22176  60340    0    0     0   132    0     0 
> 98  2  0  0
>  2  0      0 3703544  22176  60344    0    0     0     0    0     0 
> 99  1  0  0
>  2  0      0 3706488  22176  60344    0    0     0     0    0     0 
> 97  3  0  0
>  2  0      0 3711416  22176  60348    0    0     0     0    0     0 
> 98  2  0  0
>  2  0      0 3709624  22176  60348    0    0     0     0    0     0 
> 99  1  0  0
>  2  0      0 3708848  22176  60348    0    0     0    72    0     0 
> 98  2  0  0
>  2  0      0 3712048  22176  60348    0    0     0     0    0     0 
> 87  3 10  0*
>  1  0      0 3712048  22176  60348    0    0     0     0    0     0 
> 16  2 82  0
>  1  0      0 3712048  22176  60348    0    0     0     0    0     0 
> 15  1 84  0
>  1  0      0 3712048  22176  60348    0    0     0     0    0     0 
> 15  3 82  0
>  1  0      0 3712048  22176  60348    0    0     0    54    0     0 
> 15  2 83  0
>  1  0      0 3712048  22176  60348    0    0     0     0    0     0 
> 15  2 83  0
>  1  0      0 3712056  22176  60348    0    0     0     0    0     0 
> 15  2 83  0
>  1  0      0 3712056  22176  60348    0    0     0     0    0     0 
> 17  2 81  0
>  1  0      0 3712056  22176  60348    0    0     0     0    0     0 
> 14  3 83  0
>  1  0      0 3712056  22176  60348    0    0     0    12    0     0 
> 16  2 82  0
>
>
>
> -- 
> http://avatars.imvu.com/chris 

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