Profiling Ember

This article explains how to profile Ember using popular Async Profiler

Profiling under systemd

• Download and unzip the latest version of async-profiler

  # download
  wget https://github.com/jvm-profiling-tools/async-profiler/releases/download/v2.5/async-profiler-2.5-linux-x64.tar.gz
  # unzip
  tar -xvzf async-profiler-2.5-linux-x64.tar.gz
• Set runtime variables for capturing kernel stack

  sudo sysctl kernel.perf_event_paranoid=1
  sudo sysctl kernel.kptr_restrict=0
• Find EmberApp process id via jps command
• Run profiler and capture flame graph

  cd async-profiler-2.5-linux-x64
  ./profiler.sh -d 300 -f ~/ember-$(date +'%Y%m%d-%H%M').html <EMBER-PID>

Profiling under docker

• Start ember container with privileged: true parameter (edit docker-compose.yml file and restart). NOTE: unsafe, so don't forget to remove it

  ember:
      privileged: true
  note

  If you are on Ember 1.14+ where Deltix services are running under non-root user, see Appendix below.

• Exec into ember container

  docker compose exec ember sh
• Download and unzip the latest version of async-profiler

  # download
  wget https://github.com/jvm-profiling-tools/async-profiler/releases/download/v2.9/async-profiler-2.9-linux-musl-x64.tar.gz
  # unzip
  tar -xvzf async-profiler-2.9-linux-musl-x64.tar.gz
• Set runtime variables for capturing kernel stack

  sysctl kernel.perf_event_paranoid=1
  sysctl kernel.kptr_restrict=0
• Run profiler and capture flame graph

  cd async-profiler-2.9-linux-musl-x64
  ./profiler.sh -d 300 -f /var/lib/emberhome/ember-$(date +'%Y%m%d-%H%M').html 1
• If you get the error below:

  Failed to inject profiler into 1
  Error loading shared library libstdc++.so.6: No such file or directory (needed by /root/async-profiler-2.9-linux-musl-x64/build/libasyncProfiler.so)
  Run the following and try again:

  apk add libstdc++
• Find the result on host in ember-home/ directory

Profiling Example

In this example we are going to profile single algorithm that implements NIAGARA matching engine. As with any algorithm, each deployed algorithm instance runs in a single thread. Mission-critical algorithms should be pinned to isolated CPU core.

First we set up randomized load. Ember has a number of simple bots that simulate given number of FIX client clients submitting realistic flow of orders at given rate.

After repeating Profiler setup and system configuration steps defined above, let's run the profiler.

We are going to be filtering for stack frames that have Niagara code:

./profiler.sh -e cpu -d 300 -I '*Niagara*' -f ../ember-$(date +'%Y%m%d-%H%M').html --title "CPU profile" 1

Sample output:

What we can see from this report (unfortunately we can't paste dynamic HTML here):

• Matching engine is idle 3/4 of the time (CPU spin is caught in doLast() that checks if we have any timers ready, and there are none).
• About 1/4 of time is spent on processing inbound order requests. If we zoom in we can drill down on request processing:

• There are some interesting observation here, for example it takes considerable time to publish market data feed updates when NIAGARA algorithm processes new order request. And bulk of time spent on converting Level 3 feed that NIAGARA emits to Level2 data that is written into TimeBase.

Async Profiler is a great tool written by Andrei Pangin. We encourage you to read tutorials and learn more to troubleshoot performance problems in your Ember algorithms.

Appendix: profiling Ember service running as non-root

Starting from version 1.14 Ember docker service runs as non-root user.

Unfortunately in order to perform profiling you need to revert this. Follow these steps:

• Edit docker-compose.yaml
  • Remove or comment out user: 1666:1666 for Aeron and all Ember services
  • Switch TimeBase service to root user user: 0:0
  • Switch ember service to -dev tag of your ember container:

image: "registry.deltixhub.com/deltix.docker/anvil/deltix-ember:1.14.43-dev"