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Production postmortemThe random high CPU
A customer complained that every now and then RavenDB is hitting 100% CPU and stays there. They were kind enough to provide a minidump, and I started the investigation.
I loaded the minidump to WinDB and started debugging. The first thing you do with high CPU is rung the “!runaway” command, which sorts the threads by how busy they are:
I switched to the first thread (39) and asked for its stack, I highlighted the interesting parts:
This is enough to have a strong suspicion on what is going on. I checked some of the other high CPU threads and my suspicion was confirmed, but even from this single stack trace it is enough.
Pretty much whenever you see a thread doing high CPU within the Dictionary class it means that you are accessing it in a concurrent manner. This is unsafe, and may lead to strange effects. One of them being an infinite loop.
In this case, several threads were caught in this infinite loop. The stack trace also told us where in RavenDB we are doing this, and from there we could confirm that indeed, there is a rare set of circumstances that can cause a timer to fire fast enough that the previous timer didn’t have a chance to complete, and both of these timers will modify the same dictionary, causing the issue.
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- (23 Nov 2018) The ARM is killing me
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- (06 Dec 2017) data corruption, a view from INSIDE the sausage
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Comments
In my opinion concurrency related bugs that happen rarely ('sometimes') are the most hard to deal with. Congratulations to find the cause so effectively, it's really amazing.
Usually a little Googling with the method in question together with high CPU will lead you to an article: https://www.codeproject.com/Tips/1130593/Troubleshooting-High-CPU-Usage-of-a-NET-Web-Applic. It was a pretty common issue to see with people dealing with multithreading while forgetting to use locks. The intial Dictionary (.NET 2.0) implementation did cause an exception. But around .NET 4.0 they switched the hash lookup into a way which was susceptible to deadlocking instead. If you look carefully you will see that only NGenned stack frames are visible in the minidump. The JITed code parts will always be missing.
Curious what pattern you had that allowed potential concurrent access to the dictionary. I'm spoilt in my app that I've managed to avoid having dictionaries that could even potentially be shared by multiple threads. Part of that is design / planning, and part is good fortune. Is this something you're planning to audit somehow?
Ian, That piece of code is meant to run in a single threaded fashion. It is a timer called every 30 minutes or so. Somehow, it stalled for that long and two concurrent runs happened, which resulted in the race condition.
To prevent this from happening, in our code such timers get an infinite period (i.e. fire once), and in the callback the timer then gets updated to fire again. In code:
This produces a timer which fires after 30mins, and then 30mins after the callback completed, etc.
Daniel, Yes, we started to use something very similar
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